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   Tony Hoyle (tony@toot.hoyle.me.uk)'s status on Thursday, 12-Feb-2026 06:53:17 JST Tony Hoyle

   • Evan Prodromou

   @evan 'As long as they feel happy with' which could be any of the above.

   • Embed this notice
     Tony Hoyle (tony@toot.hoyle.me.uk)'s status on Thursday, 12-Feb-2026 07:03:12 JST Tony Hoyle

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan They're unpaid volunteers, not employees.

     Whether I'll continue to use unmaintained software depends on whether it still works for me (or whether I can fork it and fix issues, but that's not an option for many). Mostly I'll find an alternative, of which there are usually many.

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     Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷 (larsmb@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 12-Feb-2026 07:13:50 JST Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan @tony That's yet another question though?

     How much effort a given piece of software requires to stay functional in a changing world is very varied.

     I have a tiny C mail delivery agent I wrote for myself in 1997 and last touched in 1998. It's still working perfectly fine locally. (I had to recompile it once.)

     Compare with a project like Home Assistant, where I really couldn't guess how much effort that must be.

     I'd expect a few hours per month for an average project.

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     Tony Hoyle (tony@toot.hoyle.me.uk)'s status on Thursday, 12-Feb-2026 07:21:23 JST Tony Hoyle

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan How long is a piece of string? I've worked on stuff that I could poke once a month to see if anyone had any issues.. Big projects are sometimes run like commercial entities with multiple maintainers. And all points in between.

     But they're not maintaining software in a state where it works for me.. it's not about me.. They're doing it because they want to, and I (and many others) happen to benefit from that.