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