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"Is This Project Still Maintained?"

: Tue, 14 May 2024 | permalink | No comments If you wander around a lot of open source repositories on the likes of GitHub, you’ll invariably stumble over repos that have an issue (or more than one!) with a title like the above. Sometimes sitting open and unloved, often with a comment or two from the maintainer and a bunch of “I’ll help out!” followups that never seemed to pan out.

If you wander around a lot of open source repositories on the likes of GitHub, you’ll invariably stumble over repos that have an issue (or more than one!) There is a delusion that “maintained” open source software comes with entitlements – an expectation that your questions, bug reports, and feature requests will be attended to in some fashion. This comes about, I think, in part because there are a lot of open source projects that are energetically supported, where generous volunteers do answer questions, fix reported bugs, and implement things that they don’t personally need, but which random Internet strangers ask for.

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