I often observe that people that started a small open source project seem to abandon it sooner or later. I’m guilty of this myself in numerous cases. Reasons there are many probably, from new obligations in life to shifts in interest and whatnot.

At some point somebody comes by with an issue, or a merge request even, but the maintainer does not take care of it. Usually this ends up in forks, often though forks undergo the same fate. Apart from the immediate forks-jungle, stuff like software stores or other things might be hardlinked to the original repo, which means places like these end up with dead originals and a number of forks with varying degree of being maintained as well.

To me its just a sad situation overall. And yet I cannot find the time or motivation to maintain some stuff, because circumstances just changed. And I also do not think one is obliged to do so, just because they where nice enough to share their code when the project mattered to them.

Is there a better way? Usually these are very nieche projects, and there is not a circle of regularly active developers that could share administration of a repo, but rather a quiet one-man-show with a short timespan of incredible activity. Some kind of sensible failover mechanism once the original maintainer vanishes would probably be cool. Or any other way that introduces some redundancy in keeping a repository alive. You know how package maintainers in Linux distributions open their package(s) for adoption by somebody else if they run out of capacity? I think that is nice.

I will publish a small project soon I think, but somewhere in the future I fear to leave one or the other person frustrated again when I have moved on to other things…

  • drspod@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Back in the early 90s someone told me, “source code gets lost, but binaries live forever.” It was true back then (because of the way people shared files by trading floppy disks) but I think today in the open source ecosystem, actually the opposite is true.

    A project may not get packaged or released anymore, but as long as the source code is still available, new people can make use of that work and make derivative works with their own modifications.

    I worry that too much of our collective community work is siloed in places like GitHub that one day may throw out old repositories while spring cleaning. I hope that we see the same level of effort put into source code preservation that organizations like the Internet Archive put into binary preservation.