@jalefkowit All credit to @jzb for that one — I'm glad to see that it was appreciated!

@corbet @jzb @jalefkowit Massively. Regular articles of this kind about personalities in the Linux and open source / free software world would be a great addition to LWN.

@jalefkowit What scares the heck out of me there is I've been using exim for decades and I'm now close to the age when he started it!

@jalefkowit 80 years old, still maintains PCRE2! What a legend!!

@kishcom @jalefkowit He is a legend *and* this is an example of the continuing failure of open source software to sustain itself. Why is an 80-year-old man the only person supporting a package as widely used as PCRE? Because the open source "community" is 90% parasites and 9% divas who would rather reinvent the wheel than maintain an existing project.

This is not a feel-good story, this is a symptom of the broader dysfunctions of the OSS paradigm.

@pooserville @kishcom I mean, I don't disagree. But the first step in getting these folks what they deserve is pulling them out of obscurity.

@jalefkowit @kishcom Oh, yeah. I was running Exim back in the day and it's an incredible tool and he was exceptionally gracious with his time via the mail list.

I'm just afraid people look at this and think "Wow, he's so cool!" instead of "Wow, any ecosystem that depends on octogenarians working for free is not a healthy place and we need to fix it!"

@pooserville @jalefkowit @kishcom Same experience here... back when I was learning Exim and making contributions he was immensely patient and helpful. That was a big part of my journey into FOSS.

@pooserville The OSS paradigm is not dysfunctional just because parasites exist. @kishcom @jalefkowit

@funbaker @kishcom @jalefkowit No, it's dysfunctional because key infrastructure is effectively unsupported because maintenance is unglamorous and the few people willing to do it are ridden to burnout. As the Boomers and GenXers who started the core projects everyone relies on get closer to retirement or death, we'll see hundreds more like the XZ incident. (And, you know, finding the XZ issue was a fluke. How many compromised packages are there in your dependency list right now? Nobody knows.)

@rogerwhittaker @corbet @jzb @jalefkowit if an LWN author wanted to interview Paul Eggert one of these days (maybe also Olson?) I think that could be unbelievably valuable¹². To a first approximation, every computerized clock in the world functions because of his diligent, difficult, thorny, quiet maintenance work. It's an incredible story.

¹: https://github.com/eggert/tz/

²: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6557

@gnomon @rogerwhittaker @corbet @jalefkowit Thanks much for the suggestion!