this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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What is up with all the maintainers stepping down lately?
Original creators and maintainers are hitting retirement age.
And not many good younger people are available to take the mantle.
This is the long-term cost of how persnickety FOSS maintainers are when it comes to accepting outside contributions to their work.
Note that this isn't exclusive to FOSS, but it's just more transparent.
Over the last decade I've seen my work retire and replace with something not quite the same about 3 times now, owing mainly to some lead retiring and the replacement getting to finally throw it all away like he thought should have been done years ago.
But even in the more mundane case of things continue, it happens all the time in long standing corporate projects. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of a strong shift in direction (e.g. Windows 8 went hard on UWP and actively discouraged development using any of the long standing interfaces that Windows applications were traditionally built on). An announcing of retiring doesn't mean anything will necessarily change at all, or if it changes in a bad way there may be course correction.
Yeah, that is exactly how it works. And doing that leads to your tool dying since you have no clue how to foster a community to take care of it.
It actually leads to a fantastic product and more free time because you're not having to babysit kids who think the world owes them something because they can code 'hello world' in python.
Then the old maintainers retire and die, and so does their precious baby that was 'open source' but not really, stranding it all in an old distro. But hey, who cares how shitty the world is after you die amirite?
The code is open and there for you to read. What you're actually saying is you're too lazy to read and understand it because the world owes you something. amirite?
Lol you sound like a Russian bot. That take is wildly off-topic and in bad faith. Reread the thread and come back
Something something bad faith arguments.
It honestly (usually) does lead to a fantastic product! I maintain my own significantly used tools independently and completely agree. I also have seen locally (as a corporate pawn and life-long software engineer) what happens once somebody quits and no longer maintains their beautiful project(s).
You work so much FASTER alone than you do in a group. You also can NEVER get as far with your tool when you work alone. I think the best FOSS tools are born from independent savant developers, but for them to reliably be carried on, they have to be passed down to SOMEONE. It's not your job to foster the entire next generation of tablet-children to be able to push golden commits to your curl 2.0 repo; it is pretty worthwhile to foster at least a handful of interested and headstrong people to understand your work in its entirety, and carry on its progress. And then they can do the same, and FOSS will live on forever (as it SHOULD be).
You probably spent an obscene amount of time developing an S+ tier piece of tooling, it would be pertinent to spend another marginal month or so to raise some lil star to be able to mimic your work once you tap out.
Having more free time is cool, but there's more things in life. As MC Ride said: "LIKE GETTING YOUR DICK. RODE ALL FUCKING NIGHT." Find some lil dick rider to carry on your shit.
Yeah it's really a mystery why no one wants to step up with well-regulated people like this one in the space.
Yeah, this is a terrifying response that chases away young talent. I saw a comment mentioning how the mature devs are cut out and don't have the chance to help pull up the new dev/give them training and wisdom.
If the older maintainers don't have time for new devs without all the experience they gained over a lifetime, then FOSS is in for a crash.
Exhibit A. I wonder why nobody wants to work with you…
Jfc your replies in this thread are so cringe. Gatekeeping boomer energy.
Oh the irony. What's gatekeeping about not wanting rubbish code in your repository? Lack of knowledge is self-gatekeeping.
The 'wah wah...boomer' cries are...cringe. Either step up with the knowledge and action, or don't bother and cry "gatekeeping".
Found an obsolete greybeard
Woah I disagree so much with all that
Edit: Maybe not the sprint stuff
They're waiting on ChatGPT15 and it's ability to re-write the GNU/Linux kernel in Python3 and PHP5, commit to master branch, and finally rid the wider POSIX community of "Digitial Equipment Corp. refugees/VAX apologists who poison the minds of the youth by mentioning pointers, time sharing, endianess, word size, registers, and worst of all that while Multics may seem obtuse to the uninitiated, the way it handles memory is actually galaxybrain."
TL;DR - Seymour Cray tried to do for super computing what Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad did for men who were honorable not only in front of the wife and family but ultimately GOD.
You're making me hard! Don't stop!
The suggestion that you could go from little endian to big endian by reading about multics and shitposts about turbo assembler means you're either some kind of degenerate libertine IRIX wizard who still uses bogimps to talk about speed in relation to MIPS or the human manifestation of exclusive XOR or as the Cartesians say "what would happen if I didn't NOT ?!"
Why not port everything to JavaScript and electron. Haha
Alert("Hi I'm a kernel panic crashing this party on behalf of the Self programming language by way of not having a type system, a String not really being a string, and was expecting a long long unsigned int instead of an Integer");
Omg we could re-write it in dart-lang too in /usr/src/experimental/top-secret/.hide-this-from-the-ai/linux-kernel-dart-7.0.0-SNAPSHOT
It's gotta change to true community, where we lift each other up, looking to the future, readying others to take our mantle when we retire. That's the only way FOSS will thrive and have a chance to compete with corpos.
A number of them have written about their reasons- I can't speak for the maintainer this article is about but the general sentiment I've seen from the ones I've been hearing about is that the culture around kernel development is dogwater. Lots of it surrounding refusal to make any space for R4L and shitting on devs working on it, but then also spinning out of that are maintainers likening their quality control responsibilities to being "the thin blue line".