[PENNMUSH] PennMUSH devteam changes

[Alan Schwartz]

    The game's the thing, for in our play we touch
    Another's soul, and bring to it new life
    New words, new truth, new joy, as forasmuch
    As we increase our play we d'minish strife.

I am both pleased and wistful to announce that as of the current
release of PennMUSH, I have retired as PennMUSH maintainer, and will
soon leave the development team. Raevnos will be taking over as the lead
developer, and Noltar will be responsible for integration and release of
patchlevels. My interest in the copyright of PennMUSH has been transferred
to Talek. 

As I will no longer be providing support for PennMUSH, support inquiries
should be directed to pennmush-developers at pennmush.org. Most or all of
the PennMUSH resources I manage (the home page, ftp site, translation
system, etc.) will likely migrate to Noltar's control, although I expect
to continue to host community.pennmush.org. I also plan to continue to
run mushes using the PennMUSH codebase, including M*U*S*H.

It's sort of a cliche to say that one is leaving to pursue other
opportunities (I think that's a euphemism for 'he's getting canned' in
the corporate world), but in this case it's largely the truth. While
I've enjoyed working on PennMUSH, I have many other interests that I'd
like to have more time for, and I'm not getting any younger. :) For
example, I'll be spending the upcoming Fall, Winter, and Spring writing
a book on clinical decision making for community physicians (look for it
from Cambridge University Press, probably in late 2007 or early 2008!) 

It's been over 11 years since I took over PennMUSH development from
Amberyl. It's been an incredible learning experience, and with the help
of the much-more-talented team of developers I've managed to recruit
over that time, I like to think that PennMUSH has come a long way. As
you probably know, I'm a research psychologist; I have no formal
training in computer science. Were it not for Talek, Rhyanna, Trivian,
Raevnos, Halatir, Noltar, and Walker, I wouldn't know half as much about
data structures, algorithms, and networking as I do (I still don't know
half as much as they do). The server is in excellent hands.

Most of all, it's been a pleasure to interact with all of the PennMUSH
users and admins who've done amazing and innovative things with the
code, and produced absorbing and entertaining worlds and games of great
depth. I hope I have more time now to play at a few of these. Keeping
text-based gaming going is important -- nothing fires the imagination
like immersion in well-written prose, and nothing feeds the soul like
play.

Thanks again, folks,

Alan Schwartz / Javelin
javelin at mush.pennmush.org

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Javelin at M*U*S*H, once Paul at DuneMUSH | Alan Schwartz <dunemush at pennmush.org>
   (mush.pennmush.org 4201)         |  (Former) PennMUSH Server Maintainer
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   PennMUSH God's Guide: http://www.pennmush.org/~alansz/guide.html
        PennMUSH Source: http://ftp.pennmush.org/Source
     PennMUSH Community: http://community.pennmush.org
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