To me the most interesting thing about this is that his github history shows he really gave up in 2021, with almost no commits since then.
I don't know enough of the context of these repos, their significance or ongoing use, but it feels weird to return just to archive en masse. I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
> I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
IMO that's exactly it, the guy wanted to give a strong signal and not string people along. That I respect a lot.
> We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
I don't know who is "we" in your sentence but "we the working programmers" are busy as hell and most of us are not as privileged to basically wonder what do we do with our time. Whoever has the time and energy and if they can muster the motivation, please help -- the OSS world desperately needs much more people, and has always needed them. The rest of us who have to prioritize well-being and family are excused for wanting to spend a few leisure hours a day.
> the OSS world desperately needs much more people, and has always needed them.
Nah. Even after reading the Roads and Bridges Report, I disagree with this.
People are naive and too nice, and that's the problem that needs fixing, not reality.
The reality is that you shouldn't do open source work unless you just want to help Microsoft's AI.
Just kidding.
The reality is that you should do open source work without expecting compensation, and anyone that wants you to "maintain" things should be told that's not how it works. How it works is they should fork it and maintain it themselves. Tough, right? Well, it's free code. That's the price THEY pay for it. Making the person who gave it to you for free pay for it is asinine.
It's also asinine to imagine a world where humanity works differently. Roads and Bridges recommended some kind of invasive tracking to be able to figure out how much money an open source project is hypothetically worth to be able to report that to corporations to beg for money to monetize open source more easily (and, of course, help "diversify" it by seeing how many unicorns are doing development and keep that in a PR spreadsheet somewhere), but you can sense that all of this is false dharma. You're doing it wrong. It needs no help or money or diversity; look at all it's given us without any of that. It just needs to be used correctly.
The free software movement started by programmers, for programmers. The expectation is that the user can read the code, fork the thing, and do what they want with it. But in our eagerness to have our cake and eat it too, we imagine non-technical users have some right to demand that the developer fix the code they offered us or change it to implement some feature. And, misconditioned as they are, the devs play along and feel the onus is on them to appease that rabble, and then they get burned out.
I am not sure what point you are making exactly, I am just going to say that the OSS world can definitely be much better organized but I suppose it's the nature of the "bazaar" thingy. :)
I don't know enough of the context of these repos, their significance or ongoing use, but it feels weird to return just to archive en masse. I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.