They haven’t particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it’s happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc.

(The sceptical tone isn’t because of disbelief of Collin, it’s because we don’t know enough about the situation to be able to say Collin is or isn’t telling the truth here.)

    • Thorned_Rose
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      688 months ago

      ”Finding a co-maintainer or passing the projects completely to someone else has been in my mind a long time but it’s not a trivial thing to do. For example, someone would need to have the skills, time, and enough long-term interest specifically for this.” - https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00571.html

      As someone who runs a charity almost completely solo because of a lack of volunteers, I feel this so much in my bones. It’s one thing to say, “Hey folks, I can’t run this on my own, I need help” but it’s another to find people who actually have the level of skill, committent, passion and integrity to contribute in a meaningful way. I can get people putting their hands up but I’ve lost count of the number of people who have then turned around and said, “Oh, actually I realise now I don’t have time for this” or start in great and then just ghost me. It also takes more of my own time and energy, on top of what I’m already doing’ to onboard and train people and it sucks so hard when I do that and then people disappear shortly after - I constantly have to question whether the time it takes to do that will be worth it vs just continuing the struggle by myself.

      When you get consumers being arrogant and demanding, getting angry at you for taking too long to respond to their messages or not work fast enough… it’s soul crushing. Way too many people take volunteer work for granted or assume you’re getting paid for your time and can therefore treat you like a working-class pleb or are plain just fucking rude and entitled. :( APPRECIATE YOUR VOLUNTEERS FOLKS! We need more volunteers, and appreciation. Many hands makes light work.

    • haui
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      238 months ago

      Damn. The amount of unpaid work for something so crucial to todays communication is staggering. I always make sure to pass parts if the donations I receive (not a lot) upstream.

      I have the horrible feeling that very few people who use FOSS software and could actually donate some money at least dont do this. Do we have any numbers for this?

    • DigitalDilemma
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      108 months ago

      Reading that made me sad, angry and scared. Great article, but terrifying.

    • TheHarpyEagle
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      78 months ago

      That’s a heartbreaking read, and I can’t imagine how it feels now to know that someone who finally helped lighten the load may be involved with such an egregious breach of trust and safety.

      I think this is why I can’t get behind Linus-style takedowns, even if the prospective maintainer has made bad a mistake. Entitled consumers make things hard enough already with direct access to the developers, they don’t need any help getting burned out.