I'm reminded of Benjamin Martin's Militia in the movie "The Patriot" regarding his volunteer militia:  “We’re militia. This is not Regular army. Every man here is free to come and go as he pleases, but while you’re here, you will obey my command or I will have you shot!” 

Why am I reminded of this?  Well, I joined up with the Subtext-Devs mailing list, tried to become familiar with the Church of Edit-Merge-Commit, and submitted a handful of patches which fixed a couple bugs, and even tried to tackle a larger project such as being able to reply to comments to a post (which sucked, I guess, because it was never incorporated to my knowledge).  Then things really started taking off at work and I got myself a Pimply-Faced Youth to manage.  The problem now, is if I want to contribute again, I have to re-learn everything that has changed since the last time I opened that source code repository. 

My hat goes off to those who regularly juggle their day job, their home/family life, maintain a blog, go to their karate class or basketweaving or ballroom dancing, and still find time to contribute to SubText in a meaningful way.   So for now, I remain in the shadows, with the company of several others in the same predicament as I, trying to live vicariously through the ample discussion and commentary that the subtext-devs mailing list provides.   Even that I can't seem to keep up with as there could be days with dozens of emails.  I went away this weekend and came back to 100 messages.  Well, I will still evangelize subtext as best I can and at the very least, try to keep up with the latest versions and submit bug reports.  Not 0-day bugs perhaps :)  but when-I-get-around-to-installing bugs, if there are still any.  I'm looking forward to the newest version 1.9.5 which boasts some new skins and a tag cloud, which is going to be super cool.

And no, I don't think the price of desertion on an open source project is someone busting a cap in me.  At least, I hope not :)