John Boyer and ViewPlus initiated the liblouis project which includes liblouis and liblouisutdml 12 years ago as an open source tool to translate and format braille. With the help of ViewPlus John has dedicated a lot of time into this project, has built a tremendous community around it and has improved many a persons life.
Now at the age of 78 he wishes to move on and step back from the day-to-day work of maintaining both liblouis and liblouisutdml. For that reason we propose to move to a team maintainership where Mesar Hameed, Bert Frees and Christian Egli offer to take over the maintenance work for liblouis. This is a big shoe to fill even as a team we probably do not have the expertise, power and full time dedication as John has it. But we hope that together and with the occasional help of John and the mailing list we can keep liblouis moving and bring it to new heights.
The details will have to be hashed out but it will probably mean that Christian will keep on doing releases on a regular bases, Mesar will work with table authors to improve the language coverage and Bert has some plans up his sleeves to improve the liblouis documentation, the test coverage and maybe even some of the core opcodes.
Note that while this is excellent news for liblouis itself it also means that there is a need for a maintainer or a team of maintainers for liblouisutdml. Please step up if you want to make sure that liblouisutdml is moving forward.
The new maintainer team would like to thank John for his tremendous efforts and is exited to bring liblouis forward with the help of John and the community.