[TUHS] 3 essays on the ujnix legacy

[Cameron Míċeál Tyre via TUHS]

Good morning!

I have followed this thread with great interest. The comments about unpaid volunteers and naintainers, I agree with.

My own "drop in the ocean" solution is to donate to individuals or groups that create/fork/maintain things I consider essential to my daily FOSS-centered life.

Every dollar I give, I hope and pray there are at least ten other people giving a dollar also. It's often advertised as "buy the creator a coffee" but I'm sure "buy the maintainer some server space" might often be more on the mark.

To all the creators, maintainers, everyone that keeps essential, much used projects alive, thank you.

Cameron



Sent from Proton Mail for Android.

-------- Original Message --------
On Sunday, 11/02/25 at 05:12 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.

Arnold