Agreed for individuals. For (commercial) organizations I think it is valid. One good citizen in this respect is btw the ASF: http://attic.apache.org/ … clearly flags the dead ;)
There are also people like me, the owner and sole employee of a commercial organization, and employees of a company which allows 10% time to, among other thing, work on free software or whatever else interests them.
It says "next time you embark on creating an OSS project, consider the following steps to avoid a zombie".
Let me tell you my story. In 2003 I wrote PyRSS2Gen, a Python-based RSS2 generator. It took 2-3 days. I wrote documentation and put it on my web site. It's now used in a lot of packages.
I get a support question about once or twice a year. At this point the code might as well have been written by a stranger as I don't recall the details of how it works. I don't want to put more work into it. Which means it's a "zombie" according to this essay.
Or it's a dead weight keeping me from doing other things.
The essay implies that there's an obligation that I and any other distributor of free code must maintain things in perpetuity. Like unimpressive, I do not like the implicit sense of entitlement.
I have also written plenty of other software which are dead ends, but it took experience under deployment to figure out why it was dead end. Am I supposed to somehow withdraw the software from the public eye once I no longer think it's useful?
There's still other software which I developed for a client as free software, which I made available, but which I won't develop further unless I get funded for it. I haven't touched some of those packages for 5+ years. Do I work on it for free, and not do the the consulting work that pays my bills?