[bad_user]

It's easy to get into that trap.

We love to code and the projects you work on become like your babies. Have you ever heard of this expression from people doing what they love, or from people starting their own companies? "Like your baby"?

Well the trap is that you end up putting a lot of work in it, at first it's for fun, but then it's because what you're doing is popular and you hope of leaving something valuable behind. And unfortunately these things happen:

1. the project is never done, there's always some feature that people want or some bug waiting to be fixed, or some dependency waiting to be upgraded (these are the worst) and if nobody does it, then users will end up abandoning the project

2. people willing to contribute are very rare and people capable of great contributions and of sharing the maintenance burden are like unicorns

So the answer is: if you don't keep doing it, the project dies. In which case all of your effort was for nothing.

[jhbadger]

Projects have a lifespan. They don't have to be monuments for eternity, and if they get abandoned because the maintainer gets bored/burned out, it often is because the problem it was trying to solve doesn't really make sense in the current landscape anymore. The development time wasn't "wasted" if the project served its purpose in its era.

[AstralStorm]

There is also part 3, someone picks up an unmaintained project, cleans it up and makes it workable. Or patches in the feature.

This is what cannot happen in most shareware or freeware apps. It depends on the source code repository being easy to find, so centralized big ones win. (SourceForge, Github, Gitlab, etc.)

The sad part is companies not delegating a person to maintain or develop critical dependencies even though they could.

[azangru]

> In which case all of your effort was for nothing.

I thought people maintain open-source projects if they use them themselves. In which case, all your effort was for solving particular use cases that you had.

When developers have no further use for a project (e.g. when they've moved on to a different technology), then the project will likely die. I haven't seen many people keep maintaining a project after they've stopped using it.

[rleigh]

You can stop using the tool yourself, but still have a large active userbase depending upon it. As a result, you can still end up with an unwritten obligation to support that userbase.