The four maintainers of an open-source project used in critical infrastructure and enterprise systems globally say they are pausing updates and halting support across GitHub Discussions, Slack, or issue comments, amid burnout and a lack of industry support for their work.
External Secrets Operator (ESO) lets organisations securely store API keys, passwords, and tokens outside Kubernetes clusters – plugging into the likes of AWS Secrets Manager, Google Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, or HashiCorp Vault for secure third-party key management for K8s.
But its maintainers say they are going to pause giving support via GitHub Discussions, Slack, or issue comments and will not publish any new releases (major, minor, or patch) after they reached breaking point, with just one maintainer able to regularly volunteer their time on the project.
“People don’t always respect our time, our effort, our anything” says ESO maintainer Gergely Brautigam, a software developer at Kubermatic by day.
“They often give nothing back, not even a thank you most of the time, which just sucks life out of the maintainers,” he tells The Stack on a call.
