Questions? Answers!

Don't open source maintainers have an obligation to do maintenance?

Yes, but what the question leaves out is to whom the obligation is owed. It certainly isn't "anyone who asks" -- although it's true that many maintainers do often feel such an obligation, which is what contributes so much to burnout and disillusionment.

The only entity to whom a maintainer owes anything is themselves, absent an explicit agreement that extends those obligations to others in exchange for valuable consideration.

Think about this another way: to whom would the maintainer be obliged if they had never released their contribution as open source? Themselves, because nobody else would have even known the software existed. How can it be that by making a contribution to the software commons, that somehow obliges them to perform a potentially unlimited amount of uncompensated labour for some indeterminate time into the future?

Is this all about money, then?

Not at all. While the first thing that usually comes to mind when you hear the word "compensation" is money, there are many other forms of compensation, such as thanks, favours, social capital, and intrinsic positive feelings.

In fact, practically all compensation in the open source ecosystem is non-monetary. The "warm fuzzies" that a maintainer gets when someone (far too rarely) says "thanks for that!" is a powerful drive. Even the thought that out there, somewhere, is someone that you will never know, who is getting benefit from something you've built, can sustain many a lonely bug hunt.

The problem comes when a maintainer feels that whatever compensation they're getting for their work isn't fair, but they feel the obligation still exists. That is what leads to burnout. A large part of the purpose of the Maintainer Manifesto is to make it clear that the sense of obligation isn't real. If you feel you're being adequately compensated (in whatever form that takes) for what you're doing, that's great. But the moment you feel that the game isn't worth the candle, remember that you are under no obligation to anyone to keep doing it.

There is a monetary aspect to this too, though. Nobody can pay their rent with "warm fuzzies", and supermarkets get remarkably huffy if you try to walk out after just thanking them. One common and effective way to compensate people for their work is with money, and I'm strongly in favour of more open source developers making bank.

Doesn't "Building a Community" oblige the maintainer to continue to do maintenance?

Ask anyone who has seriously tried to "build a community", and they'll tell you just how much effort is involved in doing so. It's also work that many people who are deeply into coding are not as naturally adept at. So, straight off the bat, we're talking about people who are doing more work, possibly work they're less comfortable doing, and because they did that extra work, that means they're obligated to do even more work?

To use the common aphorism, that dog just ain't gonna hunt.

It's commonly assumed that someone who is "building a community" around their open source work is trying to grow that work into a commercial undertaking. That may even be true. However, even assuming that is true, trying to create commerce doesn't oblige a person to do work for free.

To make an analogy, an Uber driver is creating commerce around their driving skills, something that many people also do "for free". That driver may "build a community" of other drivers and passengers. Nobody (I hope) goes around expecting Uber drivers to drive them around for free as a result.