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I'm writing a talk for an internal event about gracefully sunsetting your #opensource work.

If you have ever yeeted a project into the sun, ghosted anything you've built online, or been toasted for your splendid transition of a technical challenge to a new solution, I'd love to hear from you.

What have you learned about successfully ending work that you would want me to share (with accreditation)?

#opensource
in reply to M. Vice Pres commandasaurus 🦖

Federico Mena Quintero
Federico Mena Quintero
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Conspicuously note that the project is now unmaintained - in the main README or whatever. See if your hosting allows you to mark a project as abandoned. Be gracious if someone wants to pick it up (they don't need to ask you for permission if it's open source), but do set boundaries with them and yourself about providing advice. Think whether you want them to do it as a fork, or as a transfer-of-maintainership.

(You will forever get mail about old versions, set your boundaries.)

in reply to Federico Mena Quintero

Federico Mena Quintero
Federico Mena Quintero
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Finally, be gracious to yourself. Sometimes someone else picks up the project even though you had given up on it, and does a good job - you may even become a happy user or just be able to accept that it was not a lost cause after all (without any obligation on your part to return to it).
in reply to Federico Mena Quintero

Federico Mena Quintero
Federico Mena Quintero
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I think @brainwane will have a lot more to say about this, about planned sunsetting / transfer of maintainership.
@Sumana Harihareswara
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