[sholladay]

People expect their software to improve over time, and thus receive updates, and this is perfectly reasonable. Most software is never "done". If it is a small module written in a highly mature language and operating in a stable, slow moving ecosystem, then fine. In those cases, simply document that updates will be few and far between and that this is expected for the above reasons.

More likely, development simply slows down because the maintainer got lazy, moved on to other interests, or doesn't have time for other reasons. Users don't like this and they are right to worry that the maintainer may be unresponsive or that the software will not be quickly patched in the event of a security vulnerability being discovered because the software is not actively maintained.

Your software is not complete. It is merely functional. In fact, it may not even be functional, as the rest of the world moves on without you and your code rots away.

[blincoln]

Counterpoint: I've written a lot of niche utilities over the years. Some of them are very simple, and some of them are very complex. They're specialized enough that in most cases, they are the only software that performs a specific type of work.

To my knowledge, they all still do exactly what I made them to do. Are there things I would like to add to some of them if I had unlimited time? Yes. Does not having time to do that mean that they've stopped doing what they were designed to do? No.

The only time I can see an argument for frequent updates being required (as opposed to a bonus) is for software with direct dependencies on other things. youtube-dl, for example, or the NTDS.dit-extracting functionality in Impacket are good examples of this - they work directly with content that may change at any time, so someone needs to make sure they're compatible with the current versions of that content.