[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[Monica Westin]

Hi Jan,

I absolutely love this question.

I don't think I have any good answers, but I thought I would add to this,
from my experience in the digital library infrastructure space:

In my experience, when there are what we might call "zombie" open source
projects that are no longer being developed by the community but are still
functional and in need by the community, there tends to be a pattern of
for-profit entities coming in to run them and profit from
supporting/hosting them/keeping them alive.

It's quite interesting because there is then an industry of keeping things
alive for profit, rather than letting a project die a natural death, if you
will.

Best wishes,
Monica

On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 2:45 PM Jan Dittrich <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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