THANKS to "merging jfor" voters + introducing myself

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@codeconsult.ch>]

(repost - I think the first one didn't get through)

Hi all,

It has taken some time to get the paperwork sorted out, but a few days ago I 
got news that my apache.org account has been setup.

My warm thanks to all voters - I will do my best to live up to your support!

Thanks also to Gianugo Rabellino for making the initial contacts, to Stefano 
Mazzocchi for leading the "negociations" and to Arved Sandstrom for his 
support in the process.

Last but not least, thanks to the jfor contributors which helped make it good 
enough to be noticed: mainly Andreas Putz and Chris Scott, the complete list 
is at www.jfor.org.

(Now take a deep breath - "briefly" is just to keep you awake ;-)

To briefly introduce myself, I live in Switzerland (french-speaking part, 
near Lausanne, nice place) where I work as an independent consultant, mostly 
for government agencies in Bern (german part) and do some teaching in 
software engineering at EPFL, a well-known engineering school.

I've been living here all my life except for one year in California, having a 
great time in the drums class of Musicians Institute in Hollywood. I will 
turn 40 in a few months and I have a nice family, meaning computing is not 
everything in my life - but still a very important part.

For the last few years I've been doing mostly architecture, java programming 
(mainly application-specific frameworks reused by other programmers) and 
mentoring of programming teams. Most of my projects are seen as web sites by 
end users, with quite a lot of machinery behind the scenes to interface with 
legacy databases or dynamically publish data from various sources, today 
mostly XML-based.

I'm also on the board of www.it-processing.ch, a young company that markets a 
dynamic publishing system used by parliaments to quickly publish meeting 
transcripts on the web, even while the meetings are still running.

I strongly believe in Open-Source, mostly when a company is willing to fund 
development or extension of an Open-Source project as part of a business 
need. I have doubts about the "work at day, Open-Source at night" model 
because everyone needs to eat and have a life at some point, so my emphasis 
now is in convicing my customers to fund Open-Source projects instead of 
doing their own thing.

This has worked nicely with jfor, the XSL-FO to RTF converter that we're now 
going to merge into FOP, where the initial development was funded by the 
Swiss Federal Chancellery as we needed RTF output for a project there.

The acceptance of jfor, and the great contributions that we got from around 
the world have helped comforting them that Open Source is the way to go, so 
we are staying tuned for more such projects!

I hope to be able to help make FOP a better product - the need is definitely 
here!

 -- Bertrand Delacrétaz, www.codeconsult.ch
 -- web technologies consultant - OO, Java, XML, C++






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