Jon is headed to Google. This is obviously bittersweet: I’m happy for Jon, and he’s going to kick ass at Google in their open source group, but I’m also sad because he’s one of my absolute favorite people to work with in the world. He and I have worked closely together for the last 4 or so years, first on Red Carpet and now on Beagle. It’s simply eerie the number of times we’ve had the same idea for a solution to a problem, but it’s better still that far more often we’ve had very different perspectives. In leaving Novell, he unfortunately no longer has a good excuse to come to Boston, and that means I’ll need to find some excuses to visit him in Chicago.

As a result, I’ll be taking over maintainer duties of Beagle. Doing releases, ruling with an iron fist. You know, the boring day-to-day details of an open source software project.