OSS Maintainer Abandonment
Cluster focuses on discussions about open source project maintainers quitting or losing interest, the sustainability of such projects, and solutions like forking or community takeover.
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Just because maintainer quit doesn't mean the project is dead. It can be forked and fixed.
Crazy to abandon a 6.4k star project that presumably many people are actively using… I know maintenance of OSS projects can be burdensome but there’s usually some in the community that are eager to chip in with PR reviews and handling issues. I’m surprised they aren’t interested in pivoting the product in the same general direction but giving it some novel features or something.
It's open source, it they loose interest in it anybody can pick up the code and continue supporting it.
Looks like the project's still going strong, and the maintainer's still maintaining it. The complainers, though, don't seem to have contributed anything. Perhaps they forked it?
I agree. Nobody owes anyone anything!I was merely pointing out that it's a shame that(1) it has apparently been abandoned for years,(2) people are not able to do anything about that.(Bus factor == 1, etc.)Based on the other comments in the thread, I'm sure there are people who would love to contribute.(Worth pointing out that making something open source isn't zero-maintenance by any means, especially since GitHub still doesn't let you disable pull requests.
no dev wants to forever maintain a projectunless i keep using it myself.
I’ve run into this with a niche but fairly popular open source program. It had been used by big tech cos for years, while the maintainers moved on one by one until the last guy who seems to have thrown in the towel in 2020.I considered picking it up, but I’d have to make some hard decisions about the code base that wouldn’t make everyone happy, and I just don’t have the context to do that. Another issue is the lack of testing infrastructure.So for everyone who still cares, the path of leas
Open source projects are guaranteed to be maintained forever?
Doesn't the very nature of open-source mean you can just abandon it and have someone else take up the torch when you're done maintaining it?
Who's going to maintain the software? Open source projects abandoned by founding companies don't have a stellar track record.