Re: [Announcement] Shift in Maintainership

[Nick Foster]

Just want to chime in to say: Marcus, thank you! Your work these last few years has been much appreciated by the community. Maintaining a large FOSS project is a huge endeavor, and your excellent communication and inclusion of the community has made it stronger. I'm glad for you to have the opportunity to do some more (fun!) technical development on the project.

Nick

On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 10:15 AM Marcus Müller <mmueller@gnuradio.org> wrote:

Dear GNU Radio community,

at FOSDEM 2018, I was asked whether I'd be happy to take over maintainership of the GNU
Radio project, something I've been very eager to do; by then, I had known the community
for a little more than 8 years, and the project had grown to be an important factor in
what I did on a day-to-day scale. It's been basically become family, anyways, and I was
asked to play a decisive role in that.

That maintainership came with a role as an software, and what's more important, ecosystem
architect. That's something I quite enjoyed, as it means that as long as there's direction
and progress towards that, I got to shape what my favourite software project looks like.
Pair that with the incredible amount of talent and resources that go into the most
prolific SDR framework in the solar system, and you've got really quite a grand thing
going on there! It's really been more akin to asking giants to move hills in a way that
suits the scenery than wielding a hoe to shape one's own garden. And it's really been a
fun, rewarding, and hopefully productive time:

In these three years, we've managed to finally move from the 3.7 era to a modern 3.8 era,
by which we succeeded to get the GNU Radio cart out stasis, and we've even went another
step and started the 3.9 era, where I hope modern tools and perspectives on software
development allow GNU Radio to move at a high speed.

This might be a good time to give the authority to be the one to make calls back to the
project. This means the General Assembly and the GNU Radio board will figure out how to
find a successor for my former position. For the meantime, Derek Kozel and Martin Braun
will take that power and use it for the best of the project for the near future.

I'll of course still be involved with GNU Radio (wouldn't know which other project could
stand me...), but will be able to focus on concrete aspects, which might both be on the
community side, as well as on technical projects. It's just that we're shifting away from
me being a bottleneck to development!

I'm very grateful that Martin and Derek found the time to take over this responsibility,
especially since I know they share my enthusiasm for the project, SDR and its users.

Best regards,
Marcus