[texhax] Tex Maintainers

[Karl Berry]

Hello Richard,

    So who has or will be assuming the role?

Although no one has come forward to maintain tetex per se, the TeX Live
distribution is actively maintained (by me, among many others).  Several
GNU/Linux distributions have switched from using teTeX to TeX Live for
recent/upcoming releases, for precisely this reason.  TL has been around
for more than a decade now and is not going away.
http://tug.org/texlive

    Tex could go the route of troff+eqn+pic+tbl, the old AT&T Bell Labs
    typesetter from the 1970s.

1) My sense is that the TeX user community remains very large indeed, so
   I don't see any demise in the immediate future.

2) roff hasn't gone away either :).  GNU groff, a free software
   reimplementation (with many new features), is also actively
   maintained, by Werner Lemberg and others.
http://gnu.org/software/groff

Best,
Karl