[eclipse-dev] Goodbye, and all the best

["Markus Keller" <markus_keller@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Eclipse developers and users

With heavy heart, I herewith announce that I will be giving up my current 
active roles in the Eclipse project, and that I've resigned from my job at 
IBM. My last day at work is tomorrow 2017-07-18.

Eclipse was my first "baby", and it has been an honor for me to work on 
this great initiative for 15 years. It will always have a special place in 
my heart.

As a software engineer working on an influential open source project, my 
goal was always to improve existing stuff and create new tools to make the 
life of others (and myself) easier. In the past few years, with IBM's 
resource cuts and withdrawal from critical components such as Platform UI, 
and no other company stepping in with qualified developers, I had to spend 
more and more time fixing things that had no reason for getting broken. 
The increasing shortage of competent committers attracted new 
contributors, and too many of those got elected into a committer (and even 
PMC) role despite their lack of professionalism. The abundant lack of 
quality now poses an increasing threat to the whole project.

My frustration with this situation has increased to a level I could not 
bear any longer. Reducing my workload to 80% didn't help much, and since I 
don't want to run into a burn-out, I've decided to end my misery and say 
goodbye. I'll now take a longer break and then look for a new position 
that better suits my personality and skills.

BTW: My recent silence was not due to the project situation, but due to a 
severe mountain bike accident. I broke quite a few bones and will still 
take a while to fully recover, but it looks like I'll get away without any 
permanent damages.

I'll keep my earned commit rights for now, but don't expect much activity 
from my side in the next few months. Noopur Gupta will fully take over the 
lead for JDT UI. Component  leads, please reserve some more time for 
quality control in your component. You can't count on my repo-watching 
services any more.

I wish you all the best, and I hope my negative view won't detract those 
remaining committers / contributors who know the difference between 
hacking a private script, and shipping and maintaining a successful 
product and platform.

Many thanks to all the great minds I had the pleasure to meet and work 
with.

Markus Keller
My new identity at eclipse.org will be markus.kell.r@xxxxxxxxx

(The opinions expressed in this mail are my own and not necessarily my 
employer's.)