Abandoning your open source is bad
November 9, 2023•137 words
The last duty of an open source maintainer is to find a new maintainer. If you have users, you owe it to them to pass your project to people who want to fix the bugs and patch the vulnerabilities.
Open Source Software With Users Carries Moral Obligations:
If I create expectations between me and my users, I am on the hook for conforming to them.
What about the license? Doesn’t it say that THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED?
It does, but that’s a statement about legality, not ethicality. If my readme says that my software is fit for a particular purpose, while it actually (and subtly) isn’t in a big way, my users have the moral right to be mad at me.