[Windmill-dev] So now what?

[Mikeal Rogers]

> I had just recently discovered Windmill, and was thinking of giving  
> it a whirl, when suddenly Tuesday's OSAF bad news hit.
>
> So what's going to happen with Windmill now? Does it have legs? This  
> list is aaawfully quiet this month.

The OSAF contributors to windmill are as follows. The two primary  
developers on windmill are myself and Adam Christian. We also get  
sizable contributions from Matt Eernisse and in the past have had  
contributions from Mike "Bear" Taylor.

All of us will be leaving OSAF, Tuesday will be our last day.

I've accepted at offer at Mozilla as a QA Developer and although none  
of the tasks in front of me right now will be done with windmill I'll  
remain committed to windmill as an individual contributor and expect  
my level of participation to remain about the same as it is today. As  
I'll be working at Mozilla I don't have any kind of NDA or anything  
that would prevent me from being able to work on open source projects  
on my own time.

I've had good conversations with Matt Eernisse and he has stated that  
he will continue to use windmill and contribute to it. I know Adam  
very well and I know he'll continue to contribute as well in his own  
time. Bear and Matt have accepted offers at the same company so if  
Matt continues to use windmill I imagine Bear will have to be running  
it in continuous integration.

In terms of organizational commitment from OSAF, there isn't really  
any, but that just puts windmill in the same boat as any other open  
source project. The current hosting for the project is on an OSAF  
server, and if we're asked to free OSAF from the burden of providing  
that infrastructure moving it is fairly easy and I personally have  
free hosting resources elsewhere. I think windmill is in a much better  
place than other projects to continue on as a purely community driven  
project, and thanks to the shaping of our process by people like Ted  
Leung the way we run this project won't need to change one bit as we  
move to being a purely community driven project.

The email list is quiet this week and probably will be a little quiet  
for the next few weeks :)  This week we were all sending out our  
resumes, taking phone interviews, and getting everything ready to  
leave OSAF. To be honest, I think strong feature work will be sporadic  
over the next few weeks as we ramp up in our new jobs. But nobody has  
any intention of leaving the project or abandoning it in any way.

Windmill is literally the _only_ tool that could test the Cosmo WebUI,  
and many of us are moving on to new jobs with new web applications  
that are just as complex and will require the same sophistication in  
our tools for automation, so we'll continue to use windmill.

> Should I still be looking at this, or stick with Selenium?

If testing over SSL is an absolute requirement, you should use Selenium.

If it's not, and I'm obviously biased here, you should probably use  
windmill.

Right now we're all still on IRC in #windmill ready to help anyone who  
comes by. I've never even heard of someone talking to Selenium  
developer in their IRC channel for two years now.

Although there is some active development going on right now on  
Selenium, I remember there being about 6 months where nothing seemed  
to be happening. So the obvious lull in development you'll see right  
now in the short term won't be much by comparison.

Windmill is an open source project maintained by people who have a  
history writing open source software, we've made sure that this  
project keeps itself transparent and open to new ideas and  
contributions from the community and I think it still has a long life  
ahead of it.

In addition, I personally can't stand abandonware and if the project  
ever slows to a crawl I'll simply suggest that we shut it down rather  
than have people continue to invest in it as users.

I hope to see you on IRC or back on this list once you've had a chance  
to get your feet wet a little more with windmill.

-Mikeal