Reporting bugzilla person

[osprey]

It's a risk and, again, we rely very heavily on altruism. If it wasn't for altruism, I don't think FOSS would be an option. We often don't even donate enough to cover the hours people invest in keeping the Jenga tower from collapsing.

There's quite a few projects in linux where projects were started by individuals or groups that stopped working on those projects but were then taken over. A few examples:

OpenSSH was originally maintained by Tatu Ylonen, and grew, to then be maintained by a group in about 2001 and Tatu dipped out.

Xorg was created after the old XFree86 group applied a new licence to their programs which led to a group of maintainers splitting off to create Xorg.

Gimp was maintained by two guys, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, who just stopped developing which led eventually to other guys eventually taking it over.

Cups printing system was developed by a single individual, Michael Sweet. The Apple company took it over employing Sweet, but stopped developing it in about 2020, so the Linux Foundation took it over with its OpenPrinting group.

There are heaps of examples, the above being the ones I'm familiar with.

It's worth noting that many maintainers are both altruistic, and paid to be maintainers. Companies like Red Hat, Canonical, Intel and Google employ linux maintainers who work on linux projects. Linux is now so integrated in the IT world, that any important software that is threatened with a loss of maintainer, is quite likely to be taken up by some alternative as in the above examples.

The issue I guess is going to be different in cases of different projects. Those that are large like the above, appear to be saved quite effectively. For smaller ones, the situation may be quite different. It may eventually depend on how much dependency there is on any one project.

 

[f33dm3bits]

I will offer you the olive branch if you accept.

I had to look up what that means because I couldn't remember what the expression means. I accept from my end all is good here. Will do my best to start from a clean slate from here, as I know I'm not always the easiest person to deal with either.

 

[KGIII]

It's worth noting that many maintainers are both altruistic, and paid to be maintainers.

This is especially true with the kernel. I'd suspect the majority of packages in a mainstream distro (as there are a ton) are maintained by small groups of people, without pay. Some have attracted enough attention. Some may get a few dollars as a donation.

Then, there's FOSS stuff that isn't included in the repositories. That can include anything up to Python packages to JavaScript libraries. The users here don't generally rely on those.

Here's uname(with two people):

Contributors to smuos/uname

Print system information. Contribute to smuos/uname development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Another would be cat. While it's in coreutils, only two people contribute to that part of the project.

Here's unizip (with two people):

Contributors to LuaDist/unzip

Info-ZIP unzip utility. Contribute to LuaDist/unzip development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

I could go on, but I have time constraints. One might look at those and say, 'Well, they're just small projects." But think of all the projects that build on them and how often these tools are used. Imagine how few donations they get.

 

[APTI]

I had to look up what that means because I couldn't remember what the expression means. I accept from my end all is good here. Will do my best to start from a clean slate from here, as I know I'm not always the easiest person to deal with either.

I never held any ill feeling toward you.

 

[The Duck]

While I wasn't referring to him specifically, I'm sure he'd be charmed by the inference.

I meant Linux, and our software and infrastructure, in general.

I know I couldn't refuse though.