[pmwiki-users] A personal question for his Wikiness

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 11:44:24AM -0500, David Spitzley wrote:
> Mr. Michaud, I've been wondering, how do you manage to invest so much
> time into the development of PmWiki?  Is this a case of a commercial
> venture choosing to build a piece of software as an open source project,
> or are you independently wealthy, or a college student, or what?  I'm
> just kind of agog and wondering how the miracle that is PmWiki sustains
> itself.

Well, it's a variety of things -- first, for me PmWiki is a labor of 
love of sorts, I've always been interested in technology-mediated
communications of various sorts and so this is just one of those
things that I really enjoy doing.

But beyond that, at the moment I have sufficient part-time contracts
and other resources to sustain a good living while leaving me time 
to work on Perl, PmWiki, and my other open-source projects.  In 2003 
I left my university professorship to be able to find something else to 
do, and somehow in that process I managed to get to where I am now 
so that I can work on Perl and PmWiki (which I really enjoy) and not 
have to fret too much about financial issues.  As with many things in 
my life, I've been really lucky.  :-)

All that said, I'm fairly comfortable that there's sufficient community
forming around PmWiki that it doesn't all depend on me for sustainability.
Others could (and likely would) pick up the load if I had to drop out.
But I don't foresee that happening anytime soon.

Pm