> So instead of pretending I’m going to improve things, I decided to just:
I wish many more projects had this. Sometimes it is hard to tell if something is just in a stable state and not needed fixes recently, or simply stagnated and possibly full of unresolved issues. Or course many things stagnate unintentionally (the rest of life just happens to the maintainer(s)!) so this is never going to be common, but when people actively decide they are unlikely to work on something going forward (they've scratched their itch, their need has passed) it would be nice to have a statement of such.
> "just"
That "just" list is better care than many active projects get!
For projects that turn out to be surprisingly popular or useful - it's nice if the canonical author have time to merge patches with bug fixes - but often I think a simple update to the readme along the lines of "fork X is maintained" is just fine (assuming someone in the community maintain fork X for their own use).
I think it's helpful before open-sourcing something to understand, and ideally, articulate your reasons for doing so.
In this case "I'm releasing the code because you might find it useful. I don't plan to maintain this project" is clear, and doesn't lead to others wasting effort (unless they want to fork it and maintain it themselves. )
Equally something like "this is open source because I'm actively looking for contributers" is a great signal for someone looking to get involved and help move something forward.
Perhaps more cynically I'd even appreciate "this is open source because marketing - I'm not planning to interact with hopeful contributers" is also useful to me, although maybe less useful to you.
As an aside; if you do release it as open source for marketing or contributer reasons be sure you pick a license that aligns with your other goals - specifically note that others can, and will, sell your product to make money for them, not you. That's fundamental to the open source concept.
Julia is both a gem of a human being and so humble. I met her once at Monitorama in person and was really blown away.
Her "zines" aka cartoonish technical manuals are so good at explaining some quite indepth technical concepts in a very approachable format. https://wizardzines.com
I wish many more projects had this. Sometimes it is hard to tell if something is just in a stable state and not needed fixes recently, or simply stagnated and possibly full of unresolved issues. Or course many things stagnate unintentionally (the rest of life just happens to the maintainer(s)!) so this is never going to be common, but when people actively decide they are unlikely to work on something going forward (they've scratched their itch, their need has passed) it would be nice to have a statement of such.
> "just"
That "just" list is better care than many active projects get!