One more prediction

One more prediction

I agree with you 100%. "Should" is a bit strong, but the reason I still think he might is because he has indicated that he would like to for a decade. Several of us have gently encouraged him to pursue that course for two primary reasons. First, we actually wanted to help ensure LWN would stay around. The more site development/maintenance work we could take off Jon, the more he could focus on finding/creating content and generally staying afloat. Second, remember, 10 years ago, there weren't quite so many capable free off-the-shelf site management systems around, so having access to the LWN code base would have been valuable to the community. These days most of the problems with the code base have been worked out, and the community has plenty of other CMS options. Yet to some extent, both of those original motivations still hold true.

Preparing a mature code base for public release is no small amount of work. Managing the resultant stream of patches (which may never materialize) is yet more work. It's doubtful the payback for Jon at this point would be worth it, and frankly if the choice for Jon's legacy is between the content he has provided over the years vs. the source code to the means he created to provide it, in hind sight I'd take the former. But if a tarball were to show up someday along with a wishlist of things Jon wanted added, I'm sure some of us would at least take a look and see what we could do to help.

In any case, I wish the LWN staff a happy and successful 2013.