We're seeing a pattern that is very common in the FOSS world: This plugin is going away, so people want to move on to the next free replacement. Developers are milked into clinical depression or poverty and the locusts just move on to the next pasture.

The problem we see here isn't a one-off. Developers get burned out all the time, doing what they love until they can't do it anymore - and then the crowd of users just moves on, some throwing an indignant glance behind them, others a note of thanks - but they do move on. This is the pattern that has led to many of the unmaintained plugins in the WP.org repo, dead projects at Sourceforge, and Codeplex, and Codeproject, and Bitbucket, on and on... This is the price we pay for free (as in beer). People abuse developers of free software because there is little penalty for doing so. It costs nothing to ask for features and there's always the threat/opportunity to move on to the next eager and naïve developer. The cost to business is the time it takes to find new software and re-implement - but since business doesn't track the cost of time associated with FOSS, they continue to think they're getting all these goodies for free. Well, as the saying goes: It's only free if your time is worthless.

In this case the problem is compounded by threats against the developer. Does no one realize that with this success behind them, the people who put up these sites, who splog, who threaten, that they're now just going to do the same with any other developer who stands in their way? They have resources and motivation. Think about the infrastructure that goes into supporting these sites and maintaining the ongoing abuse of the internet. That takes a lot of people, time, and money. These resources are not available to individual FOSS developers who are not getting paid for their efforts, developers who are "supported" by postcards, good reviews, and occasional praise in a public forum. The point here is - the bad guys have won here, and there are no good guys to stop them from rolling forward.

After over two decades now of spam, malware, and other internet abuse, we still spend tens of billions of dollars passively defending against those bad guys. We buy and update our anti-virus software, read with interest about the latest 0day threat, rant at our internet hosts about their poor email filters, and Share notes of support for kids and adults who get bullied in social media. But the people who do this stuff are purchasing services from companies that provide access to the internet backbone. We know where these hosts are and they know where their clients are. The problem is not that we can't find the bad guys, it's that we lack the will to follow the trail all the way to the source.

So we pay billions of dollars per year as we pretend that's the only solution that's available - and the companies that benefit from this aren't going to discourage that. And rather than finding a way to pay for pro-active remedies, we try to push the problem onto Google, government, or some other entity, because "they should do something". And while we pay these billions per year without a thought of how insane it is (how schools and other priorities could use it more) we have guys like José Conti getting terrorized and criticized for raising 2k euros for a service he's been providing for 7 years.

And let's not forget, that those resources used by the bad guys cost money, which they are getting from people who pay them to consume their content. They threaten José because they don't want to lose that money. Another way to deal with this is to stop the flow of cash to the providers of the kind of content that José has described. I'm not proposing a war on internet trash like the war on drugs or the Prohibition against alcohol. I'm suggesting that we re-direct some of our cash from passive cyber-defense against the bad guys to helping the (obviously many) people who are paying those bad guys for their content.

People! Priorize! Please!