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.
Working for Elvenkind has been a pleasure, but it has always been
hard for Elvenkind to find enough commercial projects to employ me in.
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.
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.
We make our own choices and success.
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).
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).
However, for ConTeXT and other TeX-related things, the situation is a
bit more problematic. 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 ;). To find the missing source of
income, I intend to start giving commercial ConTeXt courses and
I plan to start selling manuals via lulu. Perhaps there is a bit of
consultancy that can be found as well, and I will try to regain some
of my old mathematical typesetting clients.
But I fear that even all of that together will generate enough income
for me to continue developing modules and offering help for free. Therefore, the planned bib module replacement will be released as
commercial software, and support for other ConTeXT stuff (like the
current bib module) will become a paid service. Probably via a
subscription website, that will (for example) also host my release
notes. I am brooding on other ConTeXt module ideas that people
may be willing to pay for, and I will finish the font projects
that are still on my disk for sale via my website.
This April (until around BachoTeX) I will still be busy preparing the
luatex and metapost binaries for the TeXlive 2009 deadline, but after
that I will likely drop offline for a while, creating the Bittext website ( http://www.bittext.com ) and figuring out things like how to
be on the receiving end of Lulu and PayPal.
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. And I must admit that at the same time I am quite
excited about being "in control of my own destiny", as they say!
Best wishes to all of you,
Taco