Free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life

Connecting qualified would-be maintainers with projects looking for a maintainer is a tricky problem. Who here even knew PCRE2 was looking for a new maintainer?

I took over some fairly widely used Go projects, but only after they were archived. I had no idea they were looking for someone to maintain it.

There's a bit of a catch-22 here:

- If a project is already well-maintained then no one really needs to contribute anything.

- If a project is poorly maintained due to lack of interest or time, then this will also discourage contributions – the first think I check before contributing is whether previous PRs are actually getting merged.

For larger projects where there's always something to do, like Exim, this usually isn't a big issue. But for smaller more narrowly scoped projects like PCRE2 this is more of an issue. I'm not surprised he's having a harder time with PCRE2.

I'm not sure this is correct, but I made a quick guess at which is the most representative Debian package for PCRE, and got this order of magnitude of direct and indirect dependencies for it:

    $ apt-cache --recurse rdepends libpcre2-8-0 | tr -d ' |' | sort | uniq | wc -l
    52160

Not mention of the music software:

> Hazel is also known for his typesetting software, in particular "Philip's Music Writer",[5][6] as well as programs to turn a simple markup into a subset of DocBook XML for use in the Exim manual, and to produce PostScript from this XML.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Hazel

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip%27s_Music_Writer

My instant reaction to this was “Wait, is that PH10?”. Read the article, and of course it is.

Even in the 90s he was a famous hacker around the Computer Lab.

(The username, for those not familiar with Cambridge Lore, indicates he was the first PH to be given an ID using the scheme applicable in the mid-eighties. Someone will no doubt reply with a more precise timeline.)

> To date, he said he had received "no communications whatsoever" about taking over the project. Perhaps, once the word gets out more widely, a qualified maintainer will step forward to take PCRE2 into the future.

I think more and more open source projects will be targeted by intelligence services.

Open source maintainer is a stressful, thankless job which pays peanuts compared to what you could get for the skills and time.

Driven, talented individual who feels they are sacrificing for the good of society and are not being properly appreciated is the stereotype for a person who can be turned.

Someone should write an article like this about Edit Weitz.

https://github.com/edicl

This was great to read. I had never heard of Philip Hazel until today. Although I appreciate the work that he's done in maintaining PCRE, I hope that I am never in the position where I am still working on a project at that age.

This is an interesting problem open source might start facing. There are a lot (I assume) of mature, critical libraries with a single owner. These libraries started their life around 30 years ago, and the maintainers are ready to move on. Taking on maintenance isn't very exciting since all the fun work's been done, but the open source world needs it.

> What particularly amazes me more than the CPU power is the amount of storage that I carry in my pocket.

Even though the histories of computers seem to focus upon computational power, it seems as though the most challenging aspect in the development of computers is inexpensive memory. I was going to say fast and inexpensive memory, then I realized that we haven't really achieved that goal.

A lot of early computers depended upon the notoriously difficult to manufacture core memory. Then there are things like drum memories, which sacrifice density in order to use stationary read/write heads. And even though these forms of memory share a lot in common with hard drives, they were actually used as the main memories on some computers.

Earlier memories are even crazier, like mercury delay lines (complex, sequential access only, and a health hazard). Even later semiconductor memories endured a long period of explosive growth before reaching useful costs and densities. (Early minis and workstations often had large boards containing only memory. Early personal computers kept costs down by shipping with single-digit kilobytes of memory.)

Zoltan Herczeg, the jit maintainer is capable enough, and he is doing most of the work anyway.

I'd take this as a moment to celebrate a guy who's done a lot of great work without having his name bathed in limelight. Not a prompt to wring hands about succession or security bobbles in other people's projects.

I don't think it's somehow also Philip's burden to find or vet or train a successor. The code is out there. His license terms are unobjectionable.

If and when Philip stops work, let someone else who cares pick it up. Perhaps under new and different names. The links between the names Philip chose and Philip himself as the person behind the work will have been broken, anyway.

Follow-on forks won't take away from Philip's legacy one bit. They might even help raise attention that new groups or individuals worthy of gratitude have stepped up.

"Here at Craptech, we love open source. We love that people will spend decades of their lives working for our company, for free."

> Now, he is ready to hand off PCRE2 as well, if a successor can be found.

My dear friend Jia Tan – although I hear they go by a different name now – might be interested in taking over maintenance of PCRE.