3 ms·

I’m sad/surprised that a project with almost 8K stars on GitHub is dead. Does anyone know why they decided to not build/maintain it anymore?

by jabo 6y ago

smashah 6y ago
I am also extremely interested as to why this stopped being maintained.
- jpgvm 6y ago
  Macro: Kubernetes took all the air out of the room. Micro: Lack of funding. i.e pretty much the same as everything else that has went the way of the dodo in this space.
breakingcups 6y ago
If a project is primarily developed by one company, contributions will drop to approximately zero once funding runs out. Even if outside people are willing to contribute, there is usually no one with maintainer / merge powers who is willing or permitted to step up to handle contributions.
- toyg 6y ago
  With enough alternative commercial supporters, someone will fork and keep going. But in this case it looks like there was no ecosystem of alternative providers who could pick up the mantle.
ignoramous 6y ago
Software is hard [0], especially in the face of a rapidly changing tech industry. Incumbents are upended on a regular basis and even the mightiest FOSS projects falter, some less violently than others. Besides, stars may not be the right metric unlike community participation [1]. Could Flynn have picked up community participation had it been donated to a Foundation like, say, the Cloud Native Foundation? Another reason could be that because momentum is everything when faced with stiff competition, things may have slowed down for Flynn. Some of the things that slow projects down: 1. Overwhelming feature gap. 2. Spiralling technical debt. 3. Rise in dramatic hard-to-fix bugs. 4. Inadequate staffing / inability to keep up with the changing ecosystem. Also, looks like the lead developer (@titanous) has deleted their blog and tweets too, and so, it is likely we will never know what went on. Hopefully, they consider publishing their thoughts so that we may all learn and improve. I wonder if Pieter Hintjens (of the ZeroMQ fame) had the right idea that a software project should always attempt to reach "completion" and stay "completed". That is, you complete one key part after the other and build on top of that solid foundation that doesn't change...? This approach may help keep things in control for a small team of core developers to tackle issues arising from taking up as complex a task as Flynn's. [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD648.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... [1] https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks-extention-the-ross-index-and-the-fastest-growing-startups-in-q3-2020-7aee7fa7eed7 https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks...

I’m sad/surprised that a project with almost 8K stars on GitHub is dead. Does anyone know why they decided to not build/maintain it anymore?

by jabo 6y ago

I’m sad/surprised that a project with almost 8K stars on GitHub is dead. Does anyone know why they decided to not build/maintain it anymore?

smashah 6y ago

I am also extremely interested as to why this stopped being maintained.

jpgvm 6y ago
Macro: Kubernetes took all the air out of the room. Micro: Lack of funding. i.e pretty much the same as everything else that has went the way of the dodo in this space.

breakingcups 6y ago

If a project is primarily developed by one company, contributions will drop to approximately zero once funding runs out. Even if outside people are willing to contribute, there is usually no one with maintainer / merge powers who is willing or permitted to step up to handle contributions.

toyg 6y ago
With enough alternative commercial supporters, someone will fork and keep going. But in this case it looks like there was no ecosystem of alternative providers who could pick up the mantle.

ignoramous 6y ago

Software is hard [0], especially in the face of a rapidly changing tech industry. Incumbents are upended on a regular basis and even the mightiest FOSS projects falter, some less violently than others. Besides, stars may not be the right metric unlike community participation [1]. Could Flynn have picked up community participation had it been donated to a Foundation like, say, the Cloud Native Foundation? Another reason could be that because momentum is everything when faced with stiff competition, things may have slowed down for Flynn. Some of the things that slow projects down: 1. Overwhelming feature gap. 2. Spiralling technical debt. 3. Rise in dramatic hard-to-fix bugs. 4. Inadequate staffing / inability to keep up with the changing ecosystem. Also, looks like the lead developer (@titanous) has deleted their blog and tweets too, and so, it is likely we will never know what went on. Hopefully, they consider publishing their thoughts so that we may all learn and improve. I wonder if Pieter Hintjens (of the ZeroMQ fame) had the right idea that a software project should always attempt to reach "completion" and stay "completed". That is, you complete one key part after the other and build on top of that solid foundation that doesn't change...? This approach may help keep things in control for a small team of core developers to tackle issues arising from taking up as complex a task as Flynn's. [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD648.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... [1] https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks-extention-the-ross-index-and-the-fastest-growing-startups-in-q3-2020-7aee7fa7eed7 https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks...