[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Hi, Jan!

Regarding metaphors:

In open source software and open knowledge, I believe I run into "sunsetting" and "archiving" phrasing a lot.

GitHub lets users archive repositories -- public ones remain public but communicate appropriate expectations via an informative banner and take away the public's ability to create new issues, etc.: https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/archiving-repositories "Archive" conveys that someone else could come retrieve and use the work if they desire.

I used "sunset" to communicate that Python 2.x would no longer be maintained by volunteers: https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/ "Sunset" conveys that this is a natural, even beautiful, part of a cycle.

The "No Maintenance Intended" badge's web address  https://unmaintained.tech/ suggests "unmaintained" as a sort of, ideally, emotionally neutral wording for this status.

In open culture, Archive Of Our Own has the concept of "orphaning" a piece of fan fiction https://archiveofourown.org/faq/orphaning - "a way to remove some or all of your works from your account without taking them away from fandom". The author might no longer want to be associated with them, or have implied responsibility for responding to comments, etc. So the work remains up and available to others, but is in a sense no longer maintained. Probably too negative a metaphor for the ends you seek, but possibly could help point to more ideas.

Rituals: 

This is adjacent: I developed Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day a few years ago https://www.volunteeramnestyday.net/ as a day for people to inventory volunteer responsibilities and decide what to put down. VRAD happens twice a year, at the solstices: 

> As the sunlight in your life
> reaches its high or low extreme,
> it is a good time to ask yourself
> if you've gone as far as you can,
> and need to pull back. 

Several open source maintainers have since used VRAD as a moment to announce that they are ending or stepping down from open source projects, so I think this is a promising avenue for encouraging healthy and overdue sunsettings/archivings. Ibookmarked several announcements at https://pinboard.in/u:brainwane/t:VRAD/ .

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Changeset Consulting
https://changeset.nyc

On Wed, Mar 5, 2025, at 2:35 PM, Jan Dittrich 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