The kernel will figure something out. There are already lots of companies investing their own development resources into it. Would just need a new leader to emerge. Perhaps it’d be a rotating group of people who are responsible for managing a single release.
Tons of smaller but important projects don’t have this luxury, though.
The kernel is totally safe. I don’t see anything happening to it. Even if something were to happen to Linus (oh hell no, please live forever).
But that’s not true for the projects that don’t do headlines, everyone uses, and nobody knows. When you install software and it has like 200 MB dependencies, half of those are probably unmaintained.
Also, the term maintained is not clear. Is a project with.a single contributor and some commits this year maintained? How about tons of contributors in the past but only a release 2 years ago? And you have to differenciate the usages too, curl is dead if it does not get updated, some config parser, ls, or cat is maybe as stable as they can be.
OSS is heavily undermaintained, always has been. But the world hasn’t exploded from it yet (somehow).
The kernel will figure something out. There are already lots of companies investing their own development resources into it. Would just need a new leader to emerge. Perhaps it’d be a rotating group of people who are responsible for managing a single release.
Tons of smaller but important projects don’t have this luxury, though.
The kernel is totally safe. I don’t see anything happening to it. Even if something were to happen to Linus (oh hell no, please live forever).
But that’s not true for the projects that don’t do headlines, everyone uses, and nobody knows. When you install software and it has like 200 MB dependencies, half of those are probably unmaintained.
Also, the term maintained is not clear. Is a project with.a single contributor and some commits this year maintained? How about tons of contributors in the past but only a release 2 years ago? And you have to differenciate the usages too, curl is dead if it does not get updated, some config parser, ls, or cat is maybe as stable as they can be.
If you think OSS is undermaintained, you really ought to look at the way 90% of commercial software is developed.
It’s at least equally bad if not worse, with the added bonus that no one else can step in even if they really wanted to.
Wouldn’t surprise me to see unmaintained software anywhere.