You'd need to read up on it but the TL;DR i got from previous comments was that previously it was being funded by a company that wasn't 100% aware of the entire situation around it (they used it in their commercial product, management didn't fully understand it was being released as open source, though I also understand they didn't own the rights to the entire code base so basically that was necessary effectively). The person developing it left that company and is seeking his own funding for it but that generally the development was significantly stunted as a result.
It seems a bit here-say-ish though, so please don't assume I'm entirely correct on all fronts there and I'd encourage you to research it further!
Happy to see his Patreon is looking "healthier". I mean $1500/m isn't really that much but I'm sure last I looked it was much lower.
In other news.. consider supporting the people that support you! Personally, I spent over $100/month on Patreon. Most of those are creators rather than open source people but there are a couple of open source ones such as Ondřej Surý who works on PHP packaging in Debian/Ubuntu
Joey Hess, a formerly prominent Debian developer and author of git-annex, etckeeper and a bunch of other open source projects is also on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/joeyh
It's $1050, not $1500. I'm interested in two projects on Patreon (bcachefs and Matrix) and both projects are not getting nearly enough to be self-funded, so this raises the question if this model even works for Open Source. So far any advanced technology seems to be funded by some big corporation and it's not very good. But, I guess, users just don't care about good inner workings, they care about things they personally enjoy (cartoons, etc), so funding those inner workings is still an open question.
I think it's an issue with the marketing of it as well, I recently got notice that some of the most important open source projects I use have a patron page they depend on, yet didn't show it on github, only on their home page under donate. Same as with Kickstarter, if you want funds, you have to properly and visibly ask for it!
I donated a lot to git-annex because he did it right, showing everywhere that you could sponsor the development.
Oh, they knew it was being released as open source. There was a clear boundary between the open source and the proprietary code - I worked on both. The open source thing was just a convenient excuse for some political bullshit - either that or they thought they could buy out a GPL project and take it proprietary, which is just insane. I mean, half the copyright was Google.
I've looked into BCacheFS extensively. Two problems I have -- First, it's not there in features yet. It doesn't have quotas, nor snapshots.
Second, it lacks a formally published design for these features. Because the author is the only person with knowledge of how these things might work, it makes it really difficult to mitigate the bus factor while the project is still in heavy development.
I actually use bcachefs on my main data drive and so far it has been running solid for ~3months. That said, looks like the author has gone camping/moving/re-evaluating life. Hoping the development picks back up or that it gets rebased off of 4.12 (or maybe made into a set of kernel patches?). Wanted a COW fs - tried btrfs and kept running into issues where the drive would fall into ro mode so far not regretting bcachefs.
