Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

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I'm shocked. I've been a vim user my whole life. I use neovim lately, but I didn't even know Bram was dead. I've never interacted with him personally, but I've interacted with the tool he wrote and the documentation he wrote almost on a daily basis. Vim is part of me.

I know the project will likely continue, but I can't help but thinking: what now?

It brings up this issue of death in software for me. Software is getting old enough now that it is starting to outlive its authors. RIP Anthony Grimes and Ian Murdock. I have used both of these men's software after their demise[1][2], and I am grateful for it.

However, it does make me think. Grimes' software continues to have issues filed against it[3] by folks unaware that no one is getting notifications for them. On the other hand, Debian was popular enough to continue after Ian's passing, and continues to gain momentum.

I know it might be too soon for me to wonder about these questions to an audience. These were the giants on whose shoulders we continue to work today. I'm glad their code persists.

1: https://github.com/Raynes/fs

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock

3: https://github.com/Raynes/fs/pulls

There is another thread on HN about vim development going forward, posted on the Google Group for vim development. Christian Brabandt mentions several issues that will need to be resolved, e.g. the hosting situation for the site.

I feel that this would be an ideal thing for one of the various open source foundations to address. I.e., provide a single-source hosting environment for open source projects without needing to lean on for-profit corporations, which would include some form of hit-by-a-bus solution for those projects that lose a core (or sole) developer.

Trying to piece this stuff together after the fact is always a chore. And no amount of "well, they should have a plan in place" will help. People don't think they're going to die tomorrow, so there's always a reason to put it off for later, so they do.

I don't think anybody's worried about Linux going poof if Linus unexpectantly returns to his home planet, but there are plenty of projects that might have some issues. Having all of the domains, DNS, hosting, etc. somewhere with a real employee that can be contacted to move control to new people if required is a good thing.

https://sourcehut.org/ fits this pretty well

SourceHut is great but they still do not support[1] organization accounts. Team development, especially for relatively big projects like Vim is a pain in such environment. It's also sad they stopped publishing regular "What's cooking on SourceHut" blog posts.

[1] https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/meta.sr.ht/29

What? Project founders and software authors might not always be around?

Bram Moolenaar's passing became public last Saturday:

Bram Moolenaar has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324 (4272 points, 430 comments)

>On the other hand, Debian was popular enough to continue after Ian's passing, and continues to gain momentum.

I don't believe these are parallel, as IIRC, Ian was not directly involved in Debian since the late 90's, at least not in a day-to-day manner in the way Bram was, or say the way Linus is still managing Linux to this day.

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