DivaBlog

Zak Greant (Community Advocate) has left MySQL. His resignation letter (well, blog really) says he's left not because of concerns about the rightness of MySQL's licensing and community policies, but rather because it was the right thing for him to do...(my paraphrasing here) "leave before burnout sets in". All-in-all, Zaks' blog is pretty classy, and anyone who has done a stint working on community within a corporation can tell you about burnout.

But notice he asks the MySQL community to let the company know if his leaving is a concern...if it signals a "MyPocalpyse".

This blog makes me think of the not-so-classy, but famous resignation and postmortem posted by Jamie Zawinski upon his decision to leave Mozilla back in 1999. Most of the present Mozilla crowd will tell you they didn't thank Jamie for his letter (since it declared the project "dead")...but I might argue that his final act of publicly calling the direction of the project into question may have helped Mozilla to regroup and eventually prevail. Its a powerful thing when someone well thought of falls on their sword and says why.

Certainly Jamie's letter caught the attention of folks at Sun, who still reference it from time to time when we are discussing the importance of voice and community in our projects. If a given community it mostly happy and strong, then the occasional spat or disgruntled letter goes largely unheeded (as with the resignation of Jon Stevens from Jakarta), but if a community is teetering...a well-placed public letter can really galvanize change.