[TUHS] 3 essays on the ujnix legacy

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

> Open Source has turned out to be a marathon, not a sprint,
> and the original simple unpaid volunteer model is failing.

That's for sure.

>  - multiple unfunded critical projects exist with few new maintainers 

There's an XKCD cartoon about this.  Chet Ramey maintains Bash, I maintain
gawk, and there are other important/critical GNU tools with just a few
maintainers who have

- been at it for decades,

- are getting older and wouldn't mind scaling back (speaking at
  least for myself),

- are having trouble finding people willing to take over (also, speaking
  at least for myself).

I have heard similar things from the current Emacs maintainer who is
even older than I am (he's in his late 60s).

I suspect there are multiple reasons for this, but the bottom line
is that if the next generation of maintainers doesn't step up to
the plate, a lot of important tools are going to start suffering
bit-rot.

Arnold