“An Old New Member Helping with the Frontier Kernel”

Doug Baron just announced his presence on the Frontier Kernel mailing list.

Andre just stepped in to help close the loop that Seth opened last week when he dropped me an email out of nowhere. I fished his [that is, Seth's --ed] message out of my Junk mail folder, and a flurry of email exchanges later I find myself here, introducing myself to the list. :)

Reading the names of recent senders makes me feel as though I'm already amongst friends: Henri Asseily, David Gewirtz, David Gewirtz, Scott Lawton, Seth Dillingham, Andre Radke, Matt Neuburg. Greetings to all of you. To those who don't know me, I was one of the lead developers of the Frontier kernel, but have not been involved with it since before it went open source.

My intention in joining this list is primarily to make myself available to developers who need help working with the kernel. Time permitting, I may contribute to the build. In any case, I look forward to re-connecting with Frontier and this community.

Don't know who Doug is? He's the person second-most responsible for the existence of Frontier, after Dave Winer. Doug programmed the kernel from 1990 through sometime in the early 2000's. (I did a search in the source code: his initials appear 4,314 times!)

He was a huge part of the community, and universally liked.

I find that I'm still quite attached to Frontier, in spite of my long term intention to the contrary. Having realized that, and that I was learning quite a bit about lower-level programming by working on the kernel, it was clear that what I really want is for the kernel to keep improving. For that, we need more volunteers, which would have to come from the pool of (old) Frontier users.

That happens to be a group of people I understand quite well. Among other things, it's a group that has a collective (if small) emotional scar over the perceived "loss" of Frontier and the amazing community that had built up around it in the 90's. Virtually everyone in the community has moved on... and bringing any of them back would be difficult.

Doug is likely to be a great resource for the current, small group of kernel developers, even if he never gets very involved in coding. (He'll be the "Oracle at Austin.") Anything beyond that — like actual coding time or drawing in more of the "old ranch hands" — is gravy.

Blah blah blah... my point is that I've accepted a personal mission with the Frontier kernel. I want to build up a bright new community like we had in the late-mid 90's, around a modern, ever-improving Frontier. Doug's joining the group is a big, important first step.