As long as you are relying on the software, what you do care about is what it does today, which you get from the source. You certainly care about what it will

As long as you are relying on the software, what you do care about is what it does today, which you get from the source. You certainly care about what it will do tomorrow too (so you can keep up, or avoid having it break stuff for you), but if it goes unmaintained, you don't have to worry about that since it does the job for you. OTOH, I've been on projects where a dependency was chosen on the promise of what they will do in the future. That future never materialized, so we were left with a bunch of unfinished dependency code, maintained a bunch of components ourselves etc — it was a mess, in short. So I never rely on promises, only on what's there today.