Funny, you could write an article entitled "Why open-source maintainers quit" and have the sole text be a hyperlink to this article. The whole piece is a long w

Funny, you could write an article entitled "Why open-source maintainers quit" and have the sole text be a hyperlink to this article. The whole piece is a long whinge about "why won't maintainers do free work for MEEEEE!". Maybe they aren't using the project anymore, maybe they're busy with life, maybe they just got tired of triaging for a while - whatever. The final story in the piece really sums it up: "But when I looked at the mailing list for the project, I saw a wasteland of good patches that were completely ignored, where the submitter would ping the list a couple times and then give up. Did it seem worth spending a week to disentangle our IP from the project in order to submit a set of patches that would, in all likelihood, get ignored? No." This sounds like a great situation for somebody else to step in and pick up maintenance of a clearly-neglected project. Hell, if your company is using the software for critical-enough things to devote "a couple months" to fixing bugs it seems like it would be in your company's interest to start maintaining the project publicly, if everybody's patches are being ignored. It would certainly be more productive than complaining that somebody else won't QA and then support your fixes FOR FREE, FOREVER...