[gst-announce] The (glaringly) bright future of GStreamer!

[Erik Walthinsen]

On Thursday the 25th, I agreed to go to work for RidgeRun, Inc.  
(http://www.ridgerun.com/), a Boise, Idaho company working on embedding
Linux into devices containing both a GPP (General Purpose Processor) and a
DSP.  My job will be to build GStreamer up to the level necessary for it
to ship as a core component of their DSPLinux, with features added
specific to the various projects RidgeRun is working on.

I started working for RidgeRun this Monday, January 29.  I've been getting 
up to speed, and walking several people through the code.  Our first major 
milestone will be a test plan, which will be available early next week.  

These people have been added as new developers to the GStreamer project on
SourceForge: Brent Bradburn and Matt Howell.  They'll be pretty active
developers soon, so anything we can do to get them up to speed will make
the transition that much faster.  Please, make them feel welcome! ;-)

RidgeRun has put out a press release, which you can find on their website 
at http://www.ridgerun.com/pr/2001/01/31/0001/.

As for licensing, there will be no changes except for the addition of
RidgeRun to the copyright headers for any files I touch from now on, which
probably means almost all of them ;-)  This won't affect anything else,
though there really should be a pass through the source to clarify the
licenses of any of the code in the project right now, just to be
consistent.  There are a few more details to be worked out, these will be 
posted to the -devel list.

To reiterate, GStreamer is and will remain open-source / free-software.  
Any future work done on GStreamer will still be under the [L]GPL.  
Projects I do specifically for RidgeRun may or may not have a similar
license, and in some cases simply can't.  But RidgeRun is definitely an
open-source company, so don't anyone go ranting about a corporate
take-over <g>

In summary, this is a very good thing!  I get paid to keep working on
GStreamer, so no worries about me disappearing for 3 months again...  
RidgeRun intends to try to make GStreamer the standard media framework for
Linux, just as DirectShow is for Windows, which coincidentally was one of
my primary goals from the beginning anyway ;-)

Don't hesitate to send me any questions you have about this, I'll make
sure to give you all the information I can.  If I get more than a few,
I'll put up a FAQ somewhere.

                     Erik Walthinsen - omega at ridgerun.com
                     Development Engineer - RidgeRun, Inc.
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