Hmm, I don’t really agree with that article. The thing is, publishing something as open-source is trivial.
But, despite the opposite being written into basically all open-source license (“is provided as-is”), we expect every published piece of software to come with updates ad infinitum.
And you can’t really plan for it. You can release many pieces of open-source software that no one will ever use. And then one of them happens to become popular by chance and suddenly you’ve volunteered for the role of Benevolent Dictator For Life.
I guess, you could leave the software published and as-is, i.e. stop releasing new versions, but I’m honestly not sure that’s truly better for the users. By breaking their builds, they’ll know they have to migrate to something else. If you just leave it unmaintained, security problems will creep in and bugs will remain forever unfixed.
Hmm, I don’t really agree with that article. The thing is, publishing something as open-source is trivial.
But, despite the opposite being written into basically all open-source license (“is provided as-is”), we expect every published piece of software to come with updates ad infinitum.
And you can’t really plan for it. You can release many pieces of open-source software that no one will ever use. And then one of them happens to become popular by chance and suddenly you’ve volunteered for the role of Benevolent Dictator For Life.
I guess, you could leave the software published and as-is, i.e. stop releasing new versions, but I’m honestly not sure that’s truly better for the users. By breaking their builds, they’ll know they have to migrate to something else. If you just leave it unmaintained, security problems will creep in and bugs will remain forever unfixed.