[TUHS] 3 essays on the ujnix legacy

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2025, 11:11 PM Arnold Robbins via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> > 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.
>

Yes. When we started with open source, it was a passion project. That
passion was infectious. Others caught it too. They sent patches and some
became passionate.

As things grew, more and more people got paid. Even though the passionate
folks got money or patches or both. But the money fueled development, but
people got passionate at a much lower rate so the talent pool has dried up
a bit, especially where there isn't a lot of money flowing in.

It also made it harder to build a name contributing to open source
causally. Competing with paid professionals is hard and getting noticed to
have a chance became more difficult via that route.

So the benches are shallower as people do other things with their passion
time and the reward equasion has shifted.

Imho, volunteers built the open source movement, but couldn't sustain it on
volunteerism. The money sustains it now, but the dynamic that started and
nutured it has shifted. Nothing really replaced the "we are all in this
together" aspects of the early days.

I'll totally admit this is a bit of a simplification, but tracks decently
well with my involvement with open source over the last 40 years...

Warner

Arnold
>