It’s hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.
It’s hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.
It’s been 12 years since Heartbleed and we’ve had numerous ”lone maintainer” issues since then. The situation shouldn’t come as a surprise or be especially ”hard to believe”.
This is the state of free software, especially when it matures.
Unless the creators manage to roll some kind of ”commercial” version, it’s not very sustainable in the long run. Turns out many eyes don’t really equal many PRs
In my experience a lot of these old projects really go out of their way to dissuade contributions anyway. Lots of naysaying “it’s always been like that”, ancient infrastructure - e.g. insisting on
git send-emailpatches, etc.Usually the only way it gets resolved is when someone writes a more modern competitor and it starts gaining traction. Suddenly all those improvements that people tried to do and were told were impossible and stupid aren’t such a bad idea after all.
I don’t think that’s the case with Unity but it probably is with things like GCC, sudo, sysvinit, X11, etc.
I think that’s at least a big part of it. There’s so much unnecessary friction in legacy projects that, while understandable to a degree, sucks.