[Jack-Devel] stepping down

[Paul Davis]

Sometime in the next two weeks, I will find the time to deal with a variety
of pull requests for JACK 1, update some articles on jackaudio.org (notably
FAQ stuff), and do a new release of JACK 1.

This will be my last work on JACK. The time has come for me to step down
from my role as "benign dictator (and jack1 maintainer)". There several
reasons for this:

  * most linux distributions use JACK2 as their default, so JACK1's
relevance has diminished. I
    still believe JACK1 to be a superior choice from some technical
perspectives, but there is
    no doubt that JACK2's integration with dbus and thus its
interoperability with PulseAudio
    has made this the safe and simpler choice for Linux.

 * I really don't have the time to even think about things related to JACK
these days. It does
   any future development a disservice to have me as the bottleneck, which
I effectively am
   at the moment.

 * Because 110% of my time is spent on Ardour, the fact that Ardour now has
non-JACK
   audio/MIDI I/O options has diminished the significance of JACK for my
own work.

 * as the years have gone on, although I am still delighted by the
technical quality and
   the conception of JACK, I no longer think that it is a particularly good
idea for most users. There
   are times when it is useful

I will continue to pay for the hosting of jackaudio.org (even though JACK2
continues to be distributed, managed and communicated about via other
channels), although if someone wanted to migrate this to some other more
communitarian platform, we could look into that.

I would be happy if someone volunteered to step up as maintainer of JACK1.
It would obviously be even better if someone was willing to take the big
leap to JACK3, a version that combines all the best parts of JACK1 and
JACK2, but I think it is more realistic to accept at this point that this
is not going to happen.

If nobody does step up, then there is a good chance that JACK1 will become
officially unmaintained. This isn't of much consequence, because once the
latest pull requests are merged, there won't be any known bugs in the code,
and also because not many people use it anymore. This also means, of
course, that "maintainer" is not much of a task, should someone feel
hesitant about taking it on.

--p
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