"Seems like it wouldn't require many more resources" Actually maintaining is costly. 1. The system around it is evolving, even no features are added, necessary

"Seems like it wouldn't require many more resources" Actually maintaining is costly. 1. The system around it is evolving, even no features are added, necessary upgrade is necessary to talk to the backend, and sometime it is nontrivial. And since svn is now not popular, should they add git support to the dated infrastructure? 2. Routine SRE works should be done, deployment to new clusters, oncall alerts. 3. Bug fixes. 4. How can the maintainers be rewarded? They are working on a project in maintain-only state, who wants to do that? Basically, for hopeless projects, better to turn them down than make them alive in half-life.