[pishpash]

It depends on the circumstances. Maintainers can do whatever they want, theoretically. Practically, there is implicit community involvement, otherwise a project dies as people abandon it. Right now it isn't even acknowledged what is happening.

[akerl_]

I think you may be confusing popularity with existence.

The thing that makes a project die is if the maintainers all leave. Users don’t make a project exist. They make it popular.

If the user community all up and left, rsync would still exist and continue as long as its maintainers choose to work on it.

By contrast, if all the maintainers leave because they’re tired of dealing with assholes, the project dies.

[pishpash]

By that account an open source project never dies because the code is there for anyone to improve upon. Why does anyone care if one particular repo realization of some useful idea or its maintainers are around or not?

It's quite some value judgment and worldview to divide open source into autistic maintainers who do even if no one uses and asshole users who do not and cannot do.

[akerl_]

Woof. I think we’re just not going to agree.