Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die

Open source projects die through various mechanisms: maintainer abandonment (the most common cause, where projects are simply left unmaintained), corporate orphaning (when companies stop supporting projects they created), academic projects abandoned after graduation, funding cliffs (when grant-based projects lose financial support), maintainers being hired away by companies with restrictive policies, succession deadlocks (where transfer of ownership is blocked by access restrictions), and maintainer burnout (where minimal activity creates the illusion of health while blocking meaningful progress). The article emphasizes that many of the most-depended-upon packages suffer from these issues, often without any formal deprecation notice or archival.