Hi, As Arthur emailed me already: you people are just too gullible ! :) Taco Hoekwater wrote:

Hello everybody,

This message is to inform you all that as of today, I am no longer an employee of Elvenkind BV, the company where I have worked for during the past years.

This part is true, I am in fact an independant contractor now. Life is just more fun that way, there is no other reason.

Working for Elvenkind has been a pleasure, but it has always been hard for Elvenkind to find enough commercial projects to employ me in.

false

Even the recent (much appreciated!) funded TeX-development projects simply do not generate enough revenue for Elvenkind to make it viable to keep me as an employee in the current economic climate.

false (Elvenkind is doing better than ever, if anything)

This is not the best time to be out of a job, but nevertheless I have decided to try to make the most of it an attempt to make an old dream happen: being my own boss.

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Since quite some time already I have had a private company called Bittext that I use for various bits and pieces that simply did not fit in with Elvenkind's company strategy (its original intent was to place my font development work in that company, but it has also been used as the company behind organizing the ConTeXt Epen meeting in 2007, for example).

true

For the development of luatex and metapost, I do not expect that much to change compared to the current situation: Hans and I will continue to write funding proposals and we hope that enough of those will be granted so that I can keep that development work going much like it is. (about a 50% commitment working on these two programs in an average working week).

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However, for ConTeXT and other TeX-related things, the situation is a bit more problematic.

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Pragma ADE does not have money to fund any projects, even if I managed to find something to excite Hans that he couldn't do faster himself ;).

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To find the missing source of income, I intend to start giving commercial ConTeXt courses and

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I plan to start selling manuals via lulu.

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Perhaps there is a bit of consultancy that can be found as well,

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and I will try to regain some of my old mathematical typesetting clients.

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But I fear that even all of that together will generate enough income for me to continue developing modules and offering help for free.

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Therefore, the planned bib module replacement will be released as commercial software,

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and support for other ConTeXT stuff (like the current bib module) will become a paid service.

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Probably via a subscription website, that will (for example) also host my release notes.

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I am brooding on other ConTeXt module ideas that people may be willing to pay for,

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and I will finish the font projects that are still on my disk for sale via my website.

maybe

This April (until around BachoTeX) I will still be busy preparing the luatex and metapost binaries for the TeXlive 2009 deadline, but after

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that I will likely drop offline for a while,

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creating the Bittext website ( http://www.bittext.com )

true-ish, that really does need to be done.

and figuring out things like how to be on the receiving end of Lulu and PayPal.

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Well, that is about all I wanted to say right now. I am quite apprehensive about how this news will fall in the ConTeXT community, but I see no other way.

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And I must admit that at the same time I am quite excited about being "in control of my own destiny", as they say!

true Best wishes, Taco