In our interactions with you during Toolbox presentations at the forum we were very excited by the enthusiam and responses when we asked about people's level of interest in collaborative endeavors between developers and the janitor. The example of gdiff(1) was mentioned: to provide the source on the DT -- since it no longer has an owner in engineering (and in fact is no longer included on IRIX 6.2 -- it is now replaced with xdiff) -- so it seemed to us anyone could take and enhance it with the numerous extensions and enhancements it could adopt, then send the changes back to us to incorporate into the DT and make this available to everyone else; [repeat[, repeat[, repeat[, [. . .]]]] Obviously this can become a very powerful way to extend what we as the janitors can provide on the DT. Unfortunately, it is with great regret that, due to historical constraints, we cannot include gdiff's source on the DT. gdiff relies on a proprietary toolkit which is no longer supported by or available from SGI. Luckily, xdiff is supported by the engineering community, but the discussion about gdiff/xdiff we had at the forum is still useful. Instead of gdiff, there will be other pieces of code that we as a community will support. The CDio software is just such an example.

The v6.1 DT Gold Medal recipient, Carsten Koch's CDio, is a very positive step forward in our attempts to increase participation in joint endeavors as well as increasing the visibility of our interest in promoting collaboration between the janitor and all of you. This software for CD reading and writing audio data, as well creating efs, and iso9660 formatted CDs, provides an immmensly useful set of utilities for people with access to CD-creation technology in their own environments. And, with Carsten's generosity in giving us permission to include this source on the DT, we now have some very "inviting" code. We hope those of you who are inclined to extend or enhance CDio will do so and share with us what changes you implement. We can then provide these additions to the source from which all can learn and likewise benefit.

This is not software that we, the janitor have personally tested, but there are people who have been using it. And in fact, they have already submitted some small bug fixes. These have been included with comments to indicate the nature of the changes. It is worth reminding everyone about the nature of this kind of software. It is, by definition, not as robust or feature-rich as commercial software. This kind of source code is certainly not maintained nor supported in the same manner as is a commercial product. Thus, the extent that you rely on this software for your own livelihood, you will have to rely on your own support and maintainance.

We are very pleased to participate in the commencement of this series of collaborations. May we together create a whole larger than the sum of our individually contributed parts.