After a decade of advocating for the developer community, the time has come to wind down the Developers Alliance. For some of you, this may come as a shock.
As of April 30, 2024, we have transitioned from active advocacy to focus on completing some long-term projects, and our staff in Washington DC and Brussels have moved on to their next opportunity. My focus from here out will be an organized dissolution that should be complete by December of 2024. Someone, after all, has to turn out the lights.
While this decision was not made lightly or in haste, we’ve always known that the Alliance had a lifecycle like any other organization. When the association was launched in 2012, our focus was on building and educating developer communities – something that was needed at the time. We fought patent trolls on behalf of software entrepreneurs, championed good laws and fought bad ones, and built relationships in Washington DC and Brussels to help policy makers understand who developers were and what they did. Over the years we’ve testified in front of the US Congress, written briefs to the US Supreme Court, and intervened on behalf of our industry before courts in both Europe and the US. We’ve engaged with regulators and elected officials in the EU, US, UK, Mexico, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, India and elsewhere. I’d like to think we made a difference; the trolls have been tamed, our industry has thrived, and our views on how the law applies to software have reached the ears of the highest courts. We’ve had a good run.
But times change, and priorities shift, and the battle for the people and funds to support what we do has never been easy. In the end, our ability to find funding simply wasn’t up to the task of supporting our mission. Rather than watch the organization whither, we chose to wrap things up and allow our people and our community to move on. If you’re like me, you can sense change in the wind with the advent of things like AI-enabled tools; changes which will cause a seismic shift in what it means to be a developer. Advocating for our community has never been more important, but like the industry itself, there are global changes underway that will require new approaches to how that work is done. It is my sincere hope that new groups will emerge to fight that next battle. I am rooting for their success.
I know I speak for the many amazing individuals that have been part of the Alliance team through the years when I say “thank you” to our developer community. It has been our honor to fight on your behalf. To the tens of thousands of you that have followed and supported our work, I hope you will continue to engage with the larger developer community to create positive change. There are communities out there that remain in the fight, and I encourage you to seek them out and get involved. Like the Alliance, they rely on your energy to accomplish their work.
Over the months ahead, I will be slowly shuttering the many initiatives we have in place – including at some point our websites and social media channels. I’ve never been a fan of zombie accounts, and at any rate the way back machine will preserve the ghost of who we’ve been. Our monthly newsletter has already been wound down and apart from a random post as events proceed there will be less and less new content appearing online. I’ll miss the mission the most.
Finally, a personal thanks from me to all of the Alliance staff and alumni that poured themselves into this work over the years. If my own words and vision have had any lasting reach it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants. I know that many of you will find the end of this chapter bittersweet. I strongly encourage the raising of a glass (perhaps a vintage Ameritage?) to mark the moment.
Until we meet again.
Bruce
