All –

First of all, I want to thank you guys so much for all of the hard work you put in to bring us to this point, the first public launch of the Yocto Project. There is something really powerful when a team of talented people gathers together to do something special and then pulls it off. I know when we first put our eyes on October 17, 2010 and decided to launch our baby then, there were a few of us who quaked in our boots a bit at the thought of pulling off something like this.

But we did it! And it’s awesome to behold. It’s not perfect, but we have a lot to be proud about.

In my mind’s eye, I can think forward to a time when your code will have an impact on many people’s lives – whether it’s saving lives with medical devices, operating airplanes or cars safely, generating and routing energy efficiently or routing packets in your favorite website’s data center. Think about how many lives you can touch! Pretty amazing stuff.

So thank you, from my heart. I feel privileged to have worked with you.

Secondly, I know that tomorrow when the site goes live and announcements go out, I hope people will like our baby, and will tell us so. But you know, there are some people who could be quite critical, and criticize everything from our use of Python to package selection to the fonts on our web sites.  If you have not been through one of these launches before, this is simply a normal part of life in an open source project. When you get your stuff out there for people to see and interact with, you open yourself up to criticism too.

So don’t take anything as a personal insult. I try to look at all of it as feedback from a valuable person, and in my heart I do thank them for it.

Dave