[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[Bastien Guerry]

Hi Jan,

Jan Dittrich <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> writes:

> I agree with what you write ­– those were the observations that made
> me think about ending FOSS projects and the culture around them: Most
> terms are pretty neutral and at best one gets recommendations for a
> "clean end".

Thinking about this again, I can spot these metaphors:

- "cleaning" up code
- tech "debt"
- bit"rot"
- "dead" code

I see them in use when contributors discuss daily maintenance tasks,
they are not specific about ending projects, but ending a project could
be seen as a limit case for all of them (clean up code definitely in a
repository, aka fighting bitrot or removing dead code thus reducing the
potential tech debt of downstream users.)

Interestingly, dead projects illustrate two conflicting ideas: one is
that the dead code creates a cost that is not null and that increases
over time, the second one is that dead code might always be useful for
some reason... after all, I guess Copilot and friends are trained over
(mostly?) dead code.

2 cts,

-- 
 Bastien Guerry
 https://bzg.fr