“It’s worth remembering that the effort needed to maintain a piece of successful software over its lifetime far outweighs the effort of writing it in the first place.”
Philip Hazel is 80 and has maintained PCRE and PCRE2 for more than 27 years. Git, Grep, MariaDB, nmap, SELinux tools and Wget 2 all depend on the library on Fedora 40. He retired in 2007, kept doing the unpaid job, and now has no successor. The industry that runs on his regex engine never thought to hire one.