[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[Danny Spitzberg]

For your consideration, here are two case studies of FOSS lifecycle changes
from centralized teams doing it all (or otherwise running risk of
mortality), to community ownership and governance. Each case study is short
and sweet, covering the motivation & readiness, process, and results of the
transition.
https://e2c.how/debian
https://e2c.how/python

See more cases in this small but growing library:
https://e2c.how/library

On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 9:22 AM Jan Dittrich <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Bastien,
>
> 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".
>
> However, often people are emotionally very involved in these projects
> and at least the FOSS projects I was involved in seemed to have big
> difficulties with ending things: Unused ideas or even code seemed to
> stuck around a long time, barely used functions were dragged along.
> Pointing that out was uncomfortable, sometimes it was seen as an affront
> towards the people who initially created it. That made me curious about,
> well, rituals to let go of digital things.
>
> Jan
>
> Am 09.03.2025 um 08:43 schrieb Bastien Guerry:
> > Hi Jan,
> >> 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]
> > When it comes to describing Free Software that is no longer maintained,
> > I think the most common adjectives are "unmaintained", "archived", and
> > "inactive" - but they are not metaphors, so I'm not sure it answers your
> > question (sorry).
> >
> > I don't read "dead" or even the notion of an "end".
> >
> > "Archived" may have become more popular since GitHub, because archiving
> > a repository is a clear signal you send to potential users/contributors.
> >
> > But the more neutral "unmaintained" has been around forever.
> >
> >> -  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.
> > I would not call them "rituals" for Free Software projects but
> > recommendations on how to cleanly end a project.
> >
> > 2 cts,
> >
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