A Single Maintainer, Countless Packages, and Sudden Silence
Artem Polishchuk (“atim”), a Fedora maintainer responsible for numerous packages including Wayfire and labwc according to community reports, stopped responding roughly six months ago, and every package under his stewardship has ceased receiving updates.
-It’s simply the reality of volunteer labor
Other distros relying on the work will feel the effect.
The only distributions somewhat insulated from maintainer disappearance are those backed by paid corporate maintenance: RHEL (not Fedora), Ubuntu, and SUSE.
I have to assume this is a joke. Right? It is a joke, isn’t it?
In case it isn’t: All FOSS software is insulated from abandonment, because it is open source. If the original developer steps away from the project, the community can pick up right where they left off. Contrast that with proprietary software, which regularly leaves its users completely stranded with absolutely no recourse. This has happened so often that there’s an entire website cataloguing all the times Google alone has done it.