Happy New Year
Well.. I know that in some countries (China & Iran, etc) new year is on a different date. However, to all others we - that is the JPP team - whishes all our users and contributors a good start into 2010!
Not sure what we will have to expect from the new year and a new release (probably by mid of the year? when I find more time again)? But Larry Becker recently contributed some nice functions from SkyJUMP (EZ Buttons etc.) and Michael Michaud developed a second txt/cvs Plugin that could be integrated. And there is also quite a bit of nice functionality left from PiroJUMP to be integrated.
I am also happy that we could win some more people developing with OpenJUMP the past year and that are also willing to contribute in some way (e.g. answering on emails, editing/improving the Wiki, or contributing code) for instance Nils & Nils, Benjamin. Because the more helping hands the better the project runs and improves.
Now, a bit from the personal site, I have been thinking of our last years vote to join the OSGeo. Unfortunately I don't see that we will have the human resources to make such an effort, especially in setting up the committees and establish formal control structures. I rather see that the few time we have is spent better in making improvements to our child OpenJUMP. Besides that, I also think that the size of our team is still managable without such structures. However, we also need to think about our "busfactor" [1] :)
Anyway I won't have much time the next 3-4 months for programming and managing due to a class I will give from Jan to April. But that's now a short time compared to the 4-5 years that we, as a bunch of volunteers, have already run successfuly the project together (Larry & Co, Michael, Peppe, Andreas, Landon, etc.) and with lots of help from you (Martin, Jon, Jukka, Arnd, Pedro, Intevation, Lat/Lon, Chris, Bernd, Uwe, Edgar, Paolo, Malte, Erwan, etc.) - not to forget the people that moved on alreday.
so I am looking forward to a new exciting year with you all, and - hey - our webpage and download stats actually look quite good (see one of my previous emails). However, we can still do a bit of marketing - as we have at least as much to offer as QGIS - and I will do so;)
stefan