> Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too?

You are straw-manning a point no-one made. Herdr is open source and if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$. Clearly the donations were no-where enough and raising money was.

The point is maintaining open source projects for free is NOT sustainable and most HNers in this thread clearly struggle with not understanding that.

> This status quo is fine.

Seems like you would want him to work for free, then wait until the author becomes demotivated and then he abandons the project entirely and we'll see a new post about why Herdr got abandoned.