Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/939922/

Here is a
long reminiscence from Jon “maddog” Hall leading up to some thoughts on
Red Hat’s source-release policy changes.

Recently I have been seeing some cracks in the dike. As more and
more users of FOSS come on board, they put more and more demands on
developers whose numbers are not growing sufficiently fast enough
to keep all the software working.

I hear from FOSS developers that too few, and sometimes no,
developers are working on blocks of code. Of course this can also
happen to closed-source code, but this shortness hits mostly in
areas that are not considered “sexy”, such as quality assurance,
release engineering, documentation and translations.