On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com> wrote:

>
> Hello everybody,
>
> This message is to inform you all that as of today, I am no longer an
> employee of Elvenkind BV, the company where I have worked for during
> the past years.
>
> Working for Elvenkind has been a pleasure, but it has always been
> hard for Elvenkind to find enough commercial projects to employ me in.
> Even the recent (much appreciated!) funded TeX-development projects
> simply do not generate enough revenue for Elvenkind to make it viable
> to keep me as an employee in the current economic climate.
>
> This is not the best time to be out of a job, but nevertheless I have
> decided to try to make the most of it an attempt to make an old dream
> happen: being my own boss.


Hey Taco,

Congrats for your daring decisoin!  ;O)

There's never a right, wrong or best time.

Even more today, the day job thing is just
an excuse to stay in an illusionary comfort
zone.

We make our own choices and success.
Go for it, don't look back and keep up the
good work.

All the best and to your success,
Alan


> Since quite some time already I have had a private company called
> Bittext that I use for various bits and pieces that simply did not fit
> in with Elvenkind's company strategy (its original intent was to place my
> font development work in that company, but it has also been used as
> the company behind organizing the ConTeXt Epen meeting in 2007, for
> example).
>
> For the development of luatex and metapost, I do not expect that much
> to change compared to the current situation: Hans and I will continue
> to write funding proposals and we hope that enough of those will be
> granted so that I can keep that development work going much like it is.
> (about a 50% commitment working on these two programs in an average
> working week).
>
> However, for ConTeXT and other TeX-related things, the situation is a
> bit more problematic. Pragma ADE does not have money to fund any
> projects, even if I managed to find something to excite Hans that
> he couldn't do faster himself ;). To find the missing source of
> income, I intend to start giving commercial ConTeXt courses and
> I plan to start selling manuals via lulu. Perhaps there is a bit of
> consultancy that can be found as well, and I will try to regain some
> of my old mathematical typesetting clients.
>
> But I fear that even all of that together will generate enough income
> for me to continue developing modules and offering help for free.
> Therefore, the planned bib module replacement will be released as
> commercial software, and support for other ConTeXT stuff (like the
> current bib module) will become a paid service. Probably via a
> subscription website, that will (for example) also host my release
> notes. I am brooding on other ConTeXt module ideas that people
> may be willing to pay for, and I will finish the font projects
> that are still on my disk for sale via my website.
>
> This April (until around BachoTeX) I will still be busy preparing the
> luatex and metapost binaries for the TeXlive 2009 deadline, but after
> that I will likely drop offline for a while, creating the Bittext website (
> http://www.bittext.com ) and figuring out things like how to
> be on the receiving end of Lulu and PayPal.
>
> Well, that is about all I wanted to say right now. I am quite apprehensive
> about how this news will fall in the ConTeXT community, but
> I see no other way. And I must admit that at the same time I am quite
> excited about being "in control of my own destiny", as they say!
>
> Best wishes to all of you,
>
> Taco
>