[aspectj-users] AspectJ maintenance status

[Alexander Kriegisch <Alexander@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear AspectJ community,

for the last 15+ years, I have done a fair amount of community work,
answering questions about AspectJ and Spring AOP on the mailing list and
on Stack Overflow. For the last few years, I also have done my best to
contribute code to
  -- AspectJ proper,
  -- AspectJ JDT Core,
  -- AJDT (AspectJ Development Tools),
  -- AspectJ Maven Plugin (group ID dev.aspectj),
  -- Agent Embedder Maven Plugin
     (https://github.com/dev-aspectj/agent-embedder-maven-plugin),

and somehow ended up being the maintainer of all these products, which
of course I cannot blame anyone for but myself. I also occasionally
contributed smaller fixes to Spring AOP, i.e. to the Spring Core
project.

I love AspectJ and am still feeling honoured to be part of these OSS
projects. As a matter of fact, I have donated hundreds of person days
and thousands of hours to them privately on top of my day-time job as an
agile coach, always having to make a choice between my bread-winning
business and doing something for the OSS community. My OSS work has
always been without any compensation other than that warm, fuzzy feeling
of accomplishment and sense of purpose, doing something meaningful and
not completely forgetting about programming, which is merely a hobby for
me now and which last I was paid for some 20 years ago.

In contrast to some previous maintainers and contributors, I never
enjoyed the luxury of being employed by PARC, SpringSource, VMware,
Broadcom or any other organisation contributing to or building a
business model on top of AspectJ or the Spring Framework (which heavily
depends on Spring AOP and therefore on AspectJ), getting at least part
of my working time paid to contribute to the OSS projects above.

Now, I have arrived at a crossroads. On the one hand, I wish to continue
contributing to the AspectJ (AJ) ecosystem. On the other hand, I no
longer want to do it for free. The software is free already. I cannot
afford to always let my freelance consulting business suffer, whenever I
am contributing to AJ. I also want to reclaim part of my private life.
So, as of today I will stop contributing to the AJ ecosystem until
further notice, ideally until someone starts to substantially sponsor my
work. Whoever has a budget to hire me as a consultant or employ me (100%
remotely from a location of my own choice), please by all means do not
hesitate to contact me. Please help to keep AJ and its ecosystem alive.
We can talk about full-time and part-time and hopefully find a win-win
solution for everyone.

To be clear, currently I do not wish to step down from my contributor or
project lead roles for the Eclipse AspectJ umbrella project (AspectJ,
JDT Core fork for Ajc, AJDT), because I hope to find permanent sponsors
enabling me to continue my contributions.

Anecdotally, a few months ago I already approached Broadcom (who bought
VMware who bought SpringSource before) and offered my expertise to them
in exchange for sponsorship, contracting or employment, but they did not
even respond to my inquiry, which of course they are not obliged to. But
they are still in the business of selling Spring classes and
certifications, providing the Tanzu Spring Runtime etc. Maybe they could
invest some of their profits into ensuring the continued existence of
AspectJ, part of which also helps drive Spring. Broadcom is just an
example. Other companies who are building they business models around
Spring and/or AspectJ are also candidates for sponsoring my work.

Kind regards
-- 
Alexander Kriegisch