Waiting for a miracle

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Last month brought at least four sad pieces of news for Lino:

Noémy decided, after a promising first meeting, to not start using Lino. The obvious reason is the bus factor: their Lino site would have more than 200 users, and they can’t put such a responsibility on the shoulders of a almost-one-man project.

Sharif wants to immigrate to Europe, together with his wife. Which means that he will be lost for Lino because I cannot afford a European salary for him. Of course he will find a job, sooner or later, because he is good. He’s both intelligent and able to work in a team. I endorse him. I recommended him to Thorgate, who were reluctant at first because an immigrant means administrative effort for them, but upon my word they reconsidered the case and invited him to a job interview. Sharif sincerely plans to continue working for Lino at the weekends, but I know how it will go: after 40 hours staring at a screen he will prefer doing things with his wife and their children. At least I hope that he will. I would worry if he wouldn’t. Today I rose priority for ticket #5239 (Document & test the React front end) on his to-do list. This ticket becomes urgent because his first job interview will be next Friday, and things could get out of hand quickly if Thorgate decide to engage him.

Astrid had been planning to to work a few hours per week for Lino, besides her full-time job as a mother of three children. But two days ago she heard that she will need to find a “real” job in January 2026 because the Estonian government “optimized” the rules about paying health insurance for parents and no longer considers her a full-time mother.

Andres introduced me to a potential new Lino user, and during the meeting it turned out that publishing the source code is not an option for them. They were unable to understand why proprietary software is not an option for me. I spent multiple hours with Andres to explain him the Synodalsoft vision and why I’m doing Lino. But people don’t believe that software should be free.

As a result, I currently feel a bit resigned: I failed to bring Synodalsoft to the next level. The Synodalsoft vision was too big for a single human life. And I was not enough of a manager for such a big vision. It is not enough to publish all your software under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) (as I wrote in The Synodalsoft project); if you want your intellectual work to be “sustainably free, usable for everybody and forever”, you also need to do the administrative stuff of institutionalizing yourself. Software needs more than a human, it also needs legal person to care for it. When I will be gone, Lino will be just be an orphaned software project, and there is nothing I can do about it, except keep watching out for a miracle, which includes doing my best for providing perfect service to my customers.