Request for a new maintainer

[meteorserver]

Hi all,

Meteor started as a way for my company, Assanka (a web technology firm) to deliver real time data to the browser in a project for the Financial Times in 2006.  At the time, there were no other mature solutions for what had become known as Comet, and we needed one, so we created Meteor.  Since we open sourced it, Meteor has been used for a wide variety of applications - I know it to have been used by the Android Deacon project, the status.net and identi.ca microblogging services, several major publishers (including NME Magazine by IPC Media), and many independent bloggers, mostly via a Wordpress plugin that it itself a separate open source project.

During all this time, we have not really made many changes to Meteor.  It fulfilled the requirements we had in 2006, and after a few rounds of refinements, settled into a stable version that we've now been using for over 3 years.  In January 2012, Assanka was acquired by the FT, and we continued to maintain Meteor under our new name of FT Labs.  As technology has moved on and startups have arrived that recognise the value in providing the infrastructure to make real time data work, it's become more apparent to us that one of the best improvements we could make to the sites that use Meteor is to replace it with something else.  More recently developed tools typically use websockets and a more efficient, threaded architecture that can support far more clients per node with lower resource use.  Yes, we could upgrade Meteor to add these features, but it's no longer economically sensible to do this, when real time data is now a simple commodity that we can buy at a low cost.

In the last few days, we have retired the FT's meteor cluster, and are no longer using it in production.  We don't expect to start using it again anytime soon.

We will continue to host the Meteor project site at meteorserver.org, and don't have any plans to turn this off.  We appreciate that a lot of people use and depend on Meteor - your access to docs and the support community will not change.  In fact, the only thing changing is that we are asking for a new maintainer.  Meteor deserves to live on, and there are now others with a greater interest in it than we have (although we're still enormously fond of it).  If you run meteor and are interested in becoming its new guardian, especially if you have plans to update and improve it, please let me know.

Best wishes,

Andrew