Artemis was a promising mobile app for Kbin, with a dedicated community, a rapid pace of development, and a high level of polish. Then, the developer disappeared.

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 61 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I thought this was one of the points of open source.

"Yeah, I'm done with this. I'm not making any more changes from what it is today. If you find value in continuing it, here's the code. Go wild!"

[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Yes, but if you're lucky maybe 1 in 100,000 users will be both capable and willing to take up the reins. More often than not, when single (principal) developer projects lose its single developer the project just goes into code rot. ASF maintains tons of projects that are too valuable to lose completely but which have no one doing active development on them. It's a problem.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago

It’s a problem.

Its a DIFFERENT problem.

OP is talking about never creating because of fear of maintaining. How many good ideas have never come to anything because of this idea?

[–] Anafroj@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago

This. Nothing is more difficult than understanding someone's else code and architecture, and even if you manage that, you're now stucked with the choices somebody else made and nobody wants that (we want to make our terrible choices!).

More than a final app, the best thing to publish as FOSS is libraries extracted from it to help other developers build there own products faster. That's something other may want to maintain when we abandon it. And on top of that, it still help to publish your app using this lib to serve as practical example about how to use your it, of course.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but if you’re lucky maybe 1 in 100,000 users will be both capable and willing to take up the reins

So? You as the original developer actively wanted to get away from it, don't care what happens to it afterwards.

[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 11 months ago

I've never not cared about my code. And If I didn't care about users depending on it I'd feel like a monster.

[–] ____@infosec.pub 7 points 11 months ago

I can think of only one concrete example where the lead dev walked away - rightfully IIRC - and the community was able to pick it up, fork it, and actually maintain and continue to develop new features.

Sadly, that’s not often the case.