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> My day-to-day job that actually pays me a salary wouldn't ever provide a bulleted list of the reasons I suck, let alone a project I develop in my spare time.

The questions you received were:

> Can we expect development from the maintainer?

> How can the community support?

> Are you open to PRs and reviewing them?

> What's your time commitment?

> Should someone just fork the repo and develop it from there?

This is far from a "bulleted list of the reasons I suck". Whoever asked this cared about your project and its future. They just wanted to know what was going on. They might have been intending to contribute patches to you: they specically asked if you were accepting pull requests for review. It's extremely frustrating when you send a patch in and don't get a response.

This was my approach when I received similar questions:

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/liblinux/issues/16

I think it's better to just be sincere and provide the necessary context.

Perhaps something that could you help is adding an H1 to the readmes like "This project is finished, not being developed", with some explanation like "Unless you found a security vulnerability, your issues and PRs may be ignored or receive delayed responses. Feel free to fork this repo if needed. Please do not ask if this is dead."

This clarifies your stance so well that people acting in good faith won't bother you, and anyone who does bother you very likely isn't acting in good faith - easy to ban.

Plus, when you see someone ask questions about your project and interpret them as "a bulleted list of the reasons I suck", it implies that on some level you think "I suck because I'm not giving these projects more of my time". Giving that kind of disclaimer might help you move away from that mindset, and instead feel more at ease with yourself. Your contributions should be celebrated (as the person with those bulleted points did!), and anyone acting in good faith can appreciate them and fork if needed

This may be what I need to do.

Yes, I do have inherent guilt for not updating my projects often enough.

Perhaps it'd be good to have a template that open source projects can use to set expectations, or a badge or something. Based on your suggestion it could be something like

I consider this project

    - actively developed
    - a toy
    - finished
    - still interesting to me
    - no longer something I expect to progress

I will / will not review PRs [unless they are Security / some category].

Your best option if you would like changes is

    - raise a PR
    - ping me
    - fork it
    - use a different project
    - pay me

My attitude to forks is

   - The more the merrier
   - A necessary evil
   - I'd like to avoid them for this project if possible
   - Not allowed by the license

I've been publishing code on github for what feels like a decade and i have never felt that anyone taking the time out of their day to write a message to me via the issues page is rude. I think you're the rude one, if you don't want public interaction mark your repos prvate.

> The comment I screenshotted is passive-aggressive at best

It's polite and it asks questions that are very pertinent, given how you claim to manage your repos.

> How can the community support?

I've been involved in a project that accepted drive-by PRs and I get that that sucks. You know what helped? People who asked how they could tick something off my personal todo list before they tried to crowbar their pet feature in.

> Can we expect development by the maintainer? > Are you open to PRs and reviewing them? > What's your time commitment? > Should someone just fork the repo?

All of these questions really just ask the same one: should I fork your repo if I want to make a change.

Your very next point discusses a repo where you don't accept PRs, don't reply to issues, but also refuse to say it's not being "developed". You literally ask for PRs in the README.md, but then ignore them? Are people supposed to figure out that you think it's perfect as-is and doesn't need more input in contradiction to that?. All of the questions other than #2 are literally just trying to get you to put that in writing.

Forks suck. There's no if's, and's, or but's.

At best the original project is dead and the fork goes on to be kind of a successor. But it never really will be, because 90% of people will stay on the original, 5% of people will move to the fork, 18% of people will post on both repos about how it's unclear which one they should use, and 7% of people will post on the new repo threatening to sue because they found a similar-sounding project in some disclosure and they don't agree to your imaginary terms that allow you to sell their private info to the Illuminati.

But the worst is when the original project isn't dead. You go and do a significant amount of work to fork it, and then the original author comes back with some pretty major changes that completely break the foundation of your fork. Now you're stuck on a legacy fork, or a ton of work to rebase onto the core library. If other people are depending on your fork that's a difficult question to answer.

This email is basically asking "should I go and do all of that work?" in as polite a way as possible. If you put together a canned response (cough CONTRIBUTING.md cough) that would solve 100% of this:

> Thanks for your interest in contributing. I think this project is pretty complete as-is. If there are breaking changes or zero-days that come up, I plan on fixing them. Otherwise I don't expect to approve many PRs. If you feel you need to get a change in, feel free to fork the repository and make your change there.

Forks don't suck, BSD is a fork. There would be no linux without forks. Libreoffice is a fork, when is the last time you ever heard somebody say the cursed words "open office"? Probably about 15 years ago, when it was forked. Forking is normal and encouraged. Fork for literally no reason, all the time. It's fine.

That's a big survivor bias you have there.

Most forks don't even become relevant enough to be known

So what? Same applies to most projects in general.

Another prominent example KHTML forked to WebKit forked again to Blink.

I understand both points of view. Ideally if you decide to fork it and you're willing to take it up then leave a note in the issues on the original mentioning the fork. The original might decide to point to your fork or at least others can go look if your fork looks like a better fit for their needs.

> The comment I screenshotted is passive-aggressive at best, and there's no really good way to ask "is this repo dead" without being passive-aggressive. My day-to-day job that actually pays me a salary wouldn't ever provide a bulleted list of the reasons I suck, let alone a project I develop in my spare time.

There is nothing passive-aggressive about that comment. There is nothing problematic about it at all. Nobody's calling you slurs or making demands. I see one guy who might as well be a Mormon Boy Scout from Canada. "Is this repo dead" is not passive-aggressive, just ineloquent. Fuck my eyes until the jelly leaks out my ears if a courteous and professionally-written question constitutes "applying pressure and being rude" these days.

I don't know what a "bulleted list of the reasons [you] suck" has to do with anything (I don't see where anybody sent you one) but you're coming across as someone who invites people to your garage sale and then brandishes a shotgun and starts screaming when they set foot on your property.

> I’ve never seen any discussions or articles about whether it’s appropriate to ask if an open source repository is dead. Is there an implicit contract to actively maintain any open source software you publish? Are you obligated to provide free support if you hit a certain star amount on GitHub or ask for funding through GitHub Sponsorships/Patreon? After all, most permissive open source code licenses like the MIT License contain some variant of “the software is provided ‘as is’, without warranty of any kind.”

Here's an example of why everyone should ask if an open source project is dead:

https://github.com/mckaywrigley/chatbot-ui/issues

A number of issues complain about it leaking OpenAI keys. Nobody's figured out how, but it'd be nice to know if anybody's working on it, if it's worth submitting a PR, if it should be forked, if it's worth bothering with at all. This code is a massive liability in its current state. Its creator is absent. It warrants questions being asked about its future. Yeah, it's as-is software, but it's not an affront to your mother's virtue when someone asks if your shit still works or if you have plans to fix it. Nor is it a call for you to offer free labor.

> I’ve had an existential crisis about my work in open source AI on GitHub, particularly as there has been both increasingly toxic backlash against AI and because the AI industry has been evolving so rapidly that I flat-out don’t have enough bandwidth to keep up

Herein lies the problem? You sound overwhelmed. I've been there myself. I don't know what your year's been like but you genuinely might want to get away from the screen and get some fresh air. This is a good time of year to do it, since things generally slow down at work.

I agree with you, and it’s why I stopped posting on Github. It was called “social coding” after all. I got tired of people asking me to fix stuff. But rather than complain about people asking, I just removed it from Github.

I used to think the world would be worse off if more people do what I did by removing code they don’t want to maintain. I don’t think that anymore. There are enough people and businesses who, for various reasons, want to maintain free (in both senses of the word) software. I don’t think the marginal people like me - the people who don’t want to maintain, and who don’t want to be nagged - really contribute more than negligible value.

I make stuff to scratch my itches. I stopped being so big-headed as to think that others need to see that stuff. But if I really wanted to post it, I’d put it on a website, probably under a pseudonym, with a warning not to nag me. Not on Github.

Question: is it really that bad?

Sadly, I didn't have the opportunity to maintain a relevant enough repo.

But, why not just develop at your own pace and simply not give a damn about complaints?

Maybe a README to clarify the situation, specifying that it's your project, you are doing it at your leisure, and that's all.

True. But I’ve concluded it’s disingenuous to post on a place labeled “social coding” and then say: leave me alone. It would be like posting on HN and saying “do not respond to my comment.”

I think those who post PRs and messages on GitHub are not entitled to any response. But I can understand those who think it’s rude not to reply. I would rather not reply. So there’s no reason to post in the first place.

HN is like you go to ces or any other trade fair.

GitHub is more like a city there are different places, open stores, private building, parks.

Everyone can go into stores. Repo that is promoting themself on GitHub or other websites.

No one will go into your private house that you don't want into it. Private repo or repo with no readme , description or topics.

If you have a park with trees that look nice, maybe some people like it too and wann chill on it, if you don't want people on it write a shield private or do not step on the grass. Repo that is willing to be used by third parties, as other are interested into it as they see it. You don't want something write a rule into readme.

Yeah, I think it's a little ridiculous. You can opt to turn off issues if it's such a big deal having someone ask politely if the project is still maintained.

Yes, open source maintainers aren't obligated to do anything. Doesn't mean that asking if a project is dead or not is rude or problematic.

I think is not zero it it's possible interpretation as accusatory

I'm not sure how to ask that won't in some way feel like either a demand for action or and accusation of abandonment.

Maybe just look at the commit history. If nothing has been committed in 6-12 months and if the code is not great as is then fork or move on.

I've written a couple of libs I consider done. They are still super useful but there's nothing I want to add for 2-3 yrs now. They are not abandoned

agreed. the author is overtly insecure and projecting animus that isn't even remotely there. the post is all but a textbook example of how to ask if a project is still active or dead, and the response has only exposed how poorly the author views himself and his management of the project than frame the questioner as a villain. i think your assessment is accurate and the author would benefit from some time out. don't put so much pressure on yourself and then assume everyone else is piling on when you're beating yourself up