[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[Jan Dittrich]

Hello Maintainers,

I recently started thinking about rituals for and memories of the end 
("death") of projects [1]. How to send-off that project or idea of a 
future?

This was based on some conversations with a colleague in academia as 
well as this call for papers [2]

In particular, I wondered about the end of "open" projects, i.e. ones 
that say that their essence is "the code" and/or "the data" like open 
source software or open knowledge projects. I notices that when these 
projects are often clearly not "alive" anymore (that is, there is no 
community around the project that keeps it running or that could be 
asked),  these projects are not really "dead" either, since they are 
culturally assumed that someone could just come and continue. Thus, 
there seems to be a great hesitation to actually declare such projects 
as ended. However, there imagined end is often used to call for action, 
both inside such communities ("this feature could be the end of...") and 
outside of them (like the implied danger to Wikipedia in Wikimedia’s 
donation banners)

I would be curious if you know
-  interesting alternatives to the metaphors of "alive", "dead" and 
"grief" in this context (or alternatively, ideas on these metaphors and 
how they apply!) [3]
-  texts about the rituals around ends of projects, particularly ones 
that have such a complicated relationship to a clear end as the 
mentioned ideas of open (data/software) projects.
-  texts about the rhetorical use of imagined ends of (open) projects [4]

Kind Regards,
  Jan


[1]: Or, instead of projects one could take a larger perspective and, a 
bit awkwardly say: "the not-happening of a future that seemed attainable 
by ones activity" (in contrast to "it would be great if things would 
just magically be so that...")

[2] In German: 
https://www.soziopolis.de/ausschreibungen/call/aufhoeren-beenden-und-schluss-machen-in-organisationen.html 
("Stopping, ending and breaking off in organizations")

[3] I have thought of ossification, glaciation, weathering and 
decomposition so far

[4] Might be connected to community appropriate "extreme case 
formulations" (A. Pomerantz, 1986) and/or my use of the concept in 
https://www.fordes.de/posts/disappointment_product_community.html
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