What strikes me as strange is that you don't usually ask others to maintain your unmaintained labor of love for you, because you don't have the time and manpower. Plus, it sounded like they were complaining that they "weren't keeping up".
They were specifically asking for Windows and OSX programmers for example. Labor of love or not, doing maintenance work and testing on an OS you don't use yourself is not something most of us want to do on our free time. These guys are volunteers after all.
Because the car analogy doesn't perfectly fit. This kind of labor of love is a game that's enjoyed by many. So asking people to help is more like a barn raising than an "engine hoisting".
