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FOSS Is Always One Maintainer From Collapsing
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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Maintainers quitting is definitely a loss for everyone. However, we all have the source code. Hard fork and someone new takes up the mantle. Almost guaranteed to happen if the project is important enough.
As a foss project maintainer i think a lot of people underestimate how few people are willing to take over and maintain a project.
Furthermore I think a lot of people underestimate the time and effort it takes to maintain a project.
We see foss projects dying all the time, despite the code being available!
I want to be a maintainer and help out but I just know it'll be exhausting. I swap languages/projects all the time. I was on the DB (OLAP), architecture, GenAI and DevOps teams just this year alone. The context switching is really bad. I still would like to contribute but I'd want to pick a project that I used semi-regularly and it's hard to identify when I'm so scatter-brained :/
I agree with you in general. Many small projects with limited popularity are one heartbeat away from disappearing forever. However, projects that are absolutely essential to prevent “collapse” as the video suggests will almost certainly find new life. Red Hat, Google, Canonical, Valve, Synology etc. that all rely heavily on open source projects will pump cash to keep them alive if it comes to that. It’s not true across the board universally, but in general collapse is not imminent.
it's never as simple as that. Sure you can take it over to continue maintaining it but you now also have to stay on top of git issues. I've known maintainers who are the only ones on a fork they took over so not only are they continuing to develop they're now also the only one dealing with issue requests which can easily derail you from development. Sure there are ways to handle that and schedule it but a lot of people don't do that and get burned out.
I mean I dealt with this myself. several months ago I built an extension for firefox that tied into lemmy and mastodon and I just abandoned it. I was spending more time dealing with users than actually working on it and just said screw it, this isn't fun. So now I just make all my repos private.