Open source tools maintenance

Hi folks,

A lot of our standardization work relies on open source tools maintained
(and sometimes paid for) by individuals on their own time (and sometimes
their own dime).

We've regularly called for support (financial or otherwise) from the
membership and were generally not successful in getting any.

I am one of those maintainers (I run Specref and PR Preview). I mostly do
it because I care and love this community, as I'm no longer really using it
myself.

I'm writing to you today to warn you that these projects NEED investment.
I'm seeing a lot more errors popping up in the logs. It is very possible
that at some close point in the future something breaks in a way that I
will not have the time or resources to deal with it. When this happens, we
will be set back a decade when it comes to our editing tooling, and there
won't be much I will be able to do about it.

It's also entirely possible that the project is now running with known
vulnerabilities. I don't have the time to stay up to date. Aslo, upgrading
the project's dependencies comes with its own set of breakage risks which
I'm not ready to take (or manage should it happen).

Finally, comments like this one don't help:
https://github.com/WICG/starter-kit/issues/87. If the answer to not getting
free support from community members is to just hop to a new tool built by
someone who's not burnt out supporting it yet, we have bigger problems to
deal with than just tool maintenance.

This should be a wake up call. Unmaintained software tools are a liability.

While we have discussed plans to move operations of these tools with the
SysTeam in the future, we will still need investment to clean-up the
codebase, update the software, and build tests and processes to make
maintenance easier moving forward.

I'm happy to discuss what to do about this on this list or on a call. For
those interested in the bigger picture, I've coincidentally just given a
talk about this at State of Open Con:
https://speaking.unlockopen.com/nBXJS5/1-billion-dollars-for-open-source-maintainers

Best,

--tobie