Over the holidays, Juliette Reinders Folmer published an interesting article over at 24 Days in December.net that is well worth your attention. Juliette talks about some of the most used projects in the PHP sphere are largely maintained by one person.
And while it’s bad enough that it’s a relatively thankless job for the maintainers, what scares me is this: what will happen if one of them steps down ? Or changes job and won’t get much time from their new employer to continue working on the project ? Or just loses interest ? Or – while we don’t like to think about this -: what will happen if one of them would die ?
WordPress as a project is largely built on PHP and as such, the interesting problem raised by Juliette also pertains to the WordPress Community. The problem itself as well as the same idea with regards to WordPress specific projects (which Ryan McCue’s discussed half a year ago as well as a reply to Iain Poulson’s post ).
Read Juliette’s full post here and do let us know your thoughts.
