This could be a short rant in a Twitter post. But this will let me start writing here again.
It seems that OSS developers took a decision about two years ago and the industry too. Applications stopped being cool, communities languished, forums reduced its activity, in part for the consolidation of solutions, the decision of promoting the enterprise versions instead of the community ones and also in part of the allure of cloud, AI and cybersecurity technology market. It seems that OSS developers took a decision about two years ago and the industry too.
For instance PDI/Kettle leader and founder moved to other company and the desktop application has components (email or excel output) that had not been updated for newer versions of the software they are interfacing with. The other one is Sentrifugo a Human resource Web App, where there are no updates or activity from it’s founder in years. And lastly the BOSSIE’s awards has dropped the App category since 2017.
So, consider maintainers of those apps heroes, contribute as you can. Don’t let those products become those abandoned buildings in Instagram, they don’t deserve that.
Interesting IT Tip's 
Matt Caster is currently working on moving Kettle into an Apache Incubator project, and although he is contacting Hitachi Vantara so they can have their say on what happens with the project, because it will break compatibility with the actual PDI project (in fact it’s going to have a new name), he hasn’t have much hope on what they’re answer will be (if there’s an answer at all, HV doesn’t seem to know what to do with PDI)
If you are interested in having notice on what the future of Kettle will be, there’s a lot of activity in Slack, https://kettle-community.slack.com/, there’s also the upcoming Kettle Community Meeting http://landing.know.bi/kettle-community-meeting-2019-0, the rest of Pentaho Suite is welcome for presentations and discussions, but the organizers are centered in moving Kettle ahead, and discussing community efforts.
That was very interesting.
Thanks and I will follow the news.