Is JHOVE dead in the water again?

See this post for important updates.

In December, JHOVE 12.0 was very close to a release. Since then, next to nothing has happened. The installer for the beta version expired, and there’s been an update for that. A couple of pull requests have been merged. Otherwise — nothing.

I think what’s happened is that the Open Preservation Foundation’s very limited resources were pulled onto VeraPDF. That’s certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but it irks me that I handed support of JHOVE over to OPF only to see the ball dropped. I did some work on a PNG module a month ago and submitted a pull request; nothing’s happened since then.

I wouldn’t mind picking JHOVE up agin, but I’m going to be blunt about this: I’m done with working on it for free. If institutions that want JHOVE to be maintained really care about it, they should put up some money, whether it’s to OPF, to me, or to someone else. Open source software isn’t something that magically happens because people love to work without pay.