RE: And in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening andgood bye...

["Stephen H. Dawson" <sh...@gte.net>]

Dude,

Hang tough.  I am in a very similar boat.  It's a worldwide thing.  For now,
we just need to hang until next summer, provided nothing else breaks between
now and then.  A lot is going to tear wide open for guys like us then.

Keep in touch.

Regards,
Stephen H. Dawson

-----Original Message-----
From: Pier Fumagalli [mailto:pier@betaversion.org]
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 7:23 PM
To: Pier Fumagalli
Subject: And in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening
andgood bye...


One year, three months and five days. It definitely didn't last long, or not
as long as I would have expected, or as long as I would have liked it. What?
Oh, I believe you noticed it already: effective today I'm no longer a Sun
Microsystems employee...

Well folks, it has been a long and wild ride (quoting a friend of mine who
was in more or less the same position as I am right now some months ago),
but as all rides, you pay your toll, you get some fun, and then, the ride is
over... I believe you all heard about that Sun Microsystems was having its
first roll of layoffs ever, and from what I was told, my situation (working
in London, employed in Dublin, and with my team in Santa Clara) was in a
very dangerous position. And when managers had to come off with a name for
my team, well, my name was an easy pick :)

No hard feelings though. I still think that Sun is a great place to work at,
most of my heroes are all still there (sigh!) from James Gosling to Joshua
Bloch (some others have gone) and a bunch of friends are still working
there. It's a good company, overall, maybe sometimes it takes them some time
to understand how open source works (not that I know much about it), but
most of the times, at the end, they get it right... And I mean, who never
made a mistake or two in their lives?

I just think that the projects I was dealing with (native and web-server
integration with Tomcat) were not enough to justify my "displaced" situation
(it's somehow weird when you have to attend to a phone meeting at 11 PM! :)
but I was prepared, I smelled it from quite some time, and I got my
confirmation today.

What does it mean for me? Well, somehow, it means a lot. It means that all
you folks who were waiting for my return in California will have to wait for
quite some time now, more than the planned six months, I don't have the
strength at the moment to chase another visa, to start it all over again.
I'll settle down here in London (it's a nice town when it doesn't rain), I
have a good number of friends, clubs are nice, and my cats are getting used
to the upcoming cold winter. But no more of sunny California for quite a
long time, no more rides on my brand new Suzuki GSX-1300R on Highway 1, no
more skiing in Tahoe, no more cheap ADSL and large bandwidth access. Oh,
well, I'll survive.

What does that mean in terms of my involvement with the Apache Software
Foundation, the Jakarta Project, Tomcat, and so on? Nothing. Nothing
changes, I've been around here for a reasonable amount of years now, and I
am planning to stick around for a lot more to come. The only thing changing
is that I got back my independence, I got back my status of "open source
developer" for real, and if someone asks me that one of the projects I'm
working on doesn't run on my "favorite" platform (Windows), I can just say,
go ahead, fix it yourself, I don't care.

How I see it? I traded my independence as an open source developer with my
dream of living in a place I love, I traded my salary for a lump of more
freedom. The only thing I somehow regret, is that this time I didn't have
the power of choice, but I accept it, and frankly, I'm not sad about what
happened...

So, from now on, Pier is me. It means that what I think, what I say or what
I do is because of some strange plot at Sun. My wickedness is only mine, and
it's going to be like that for quite some time (get ready :)...

And in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good bye...

    Pier (and his two independent cats: Sharon and Becky)


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