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Comment by jamis | Hacker News Reader

Why is it "grossly irresponsible" of me to take this action? Are lives going to be lost or injured as a result? Will the economy suffer? Will my leaving this project result in a health epidemic?

I've never made any promises about the project. I never claimed that I would be around for ever. I never said I would ignore questions, either -- just that I would ignore emails sent directly to me. But I'm going to remain on the mailing list, and will remain about as responsive there as I have (and I'm, by far, the most frequest poster there).

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Why not look for someone to take over as maintainer? I'm sure an appropriate person in the community would step forward.

This is the traditional method in most open-source communities... particularly where there are canonical distribution sources such as the rubyforge gems.

I don't believe that's effective, especially for projects like Net::SSH and Capistrano where the hacker-to-user ratio is so low. If someone wants to step forward and maintain Capistrano, they'll do so, and the community will organize around them because they'll show they have the passion to do it. If no one steps forward, then an appointment would have failed anyway, because obviously no one has the necessary passion to maintain it, and it might be better for it to die and make way for other alternatives. Either way, appointing a successor would be futile.

Even if no one steps forward, would that be so bad? Capistrano works perfectly well for the vast majority of folks. It's not like I'm leaving behind a legacy of mostly-broken software. :)

i don't think it's as much an issue of organizing around that new person as it is organizing around the new home for the software, regardless of who is maintaining it.

if i want to update my installed version of net::ssh, can i go to the project's homepage and download a new version or do i have to look through a dozen forks on github to find out which one looks to be the most maintained and hasn't broken anything?

And for what it's worth: I wasn't trying to yank your chain, or be one more bit of stress in your life. I didn't know you'd stay on the mailing list, that's good of you.

Setting up the website, writing docs, writing the mailing list, taking improvements -- you might not have made an explicit promise to be immortal and support capistrano and all western civilization in perpetuity, but your actions led people to believe they could rely on you.

We could, and did rely on the code he produced. But that doesn't mean anyone believed they could rely on him. If he had said, "You can rely on me", you might have an argument. Your bad for reading too much into it.

From the blog post:

> For Capistrano, I will continue to follow the mailing list, and might appear in the #capistrano irc channel from time to time, but I am no longer the maintainer of these projects.

He kind of came out and said it.

Sorry to jump on the beatdown bandwagon, but there really is no defense for your attitude here.

Because a lot of people relied on you and you left them hanging. You can beat up on the straw man about killing people, but ditching the project isn't cool.

Open Source just doesn't work that way. People move on. I'm sure for an appropriate price you could find someone to continue to support the software.

It's one thing if people fall back on things they've explicitly promised; it's another if someone just honestly says, "I don't have the time and energy for this anymore."

Sure it is. Jamis did this work for free, he doesn't owe you or anyone else any of his time to continue to maintain an application that he has burned out on.

Open source software gets abandoned all the time. This is only being discussed here because Jamis took the gentleman's approach and informed everyone that he was stepping down.

People say there isn't an entitlement mentality amongst people these days, but this kind of reaction is pretty compelling evidence that there is.

If you're willing to Paypal me $100 or $200 I'll learn me some Ruby in a few hours and start fixing bugs :D

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