Post #3138597
2025-08-28 15:03 UTC
@pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net @joshbressers@infosec.exchange there's the scary reality. If you look at these projects from a business continuity perspective, a large percentage of "one maintainer" projects are either already "zero maintainer" projects or will become one of them soon, because life happens to people.
They become parents and focus more time on their kids. They had a job that paid the bills and gave them the free time to devote to the project...until they lost the job and had to hustle with other stuff just to make ends meet. Their parent became unexpectedly ill and they had to devote time to care. They got into a vehicle collision and were either incapacitated or...died.
Seriously, how many of these get abandoned because the lone maintainer died? With no business continuity plan, things go bad in a hurry. And with probably millions of these sole-maintainer projects, it's an absolute guarantee that this is happening frequently. Silently.
Replies (1)
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@pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net 2025-08-28 21:35
@mweiss@infosec.exchange @joshbressers@infosec.exchange even when things don't go bad, I have something like a hendred projects I'm involved with (some alone, some with other people). Most of these I wouldn't say have one maintainer, more like 0.01 depending on how I'm busy with my paid job and the 99 other projects. And for some of them I just lost interest and moved on to other things. So that's an even more worrying thing that doesn't show in the graphs in the article.