It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
I’m very lucky that I get to work in an upstream focused open source job. But I also maintain a few small packages personally and those only get attention when there are contributions to review or I have a personal itch to scratch. I’ll leave enhancement requests in the trackers and just mark them as such and occasionally have a go at them if I feel the urge. No one not paying should expect anymore from maintainers.