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Comment by goku12 | Hacker News Reader

I think the 'project is abandoned if not updated' mentality came from corporate development culture. Unfortunately, I don't see any other reasonable way to for users to evaluate the project status. This wasn't how free software ecosystem was supposed to operate.

And yes, the solution is to add a note right at the top of README, saying that the project is not abandoned and any new bugfixes or feature updates will be considered. Ideally, this should be standardized, with a common way to represent project status across all projects.

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Thank you for sharing your perspective! You have prompted me to rethink this from the user's point of view. I believe we indeed need to first address the question of "how can we know if this project is still viable."

Well you might also need a mission accomplished banner but it needs to say something a little different than "mission accomplished".

It could even be something like a badge of honor for developers to strive for which needs to be earned. Like they have in industrial environments where they proudly post how many months or years they have gone without a serious injury.

Maybe people would respond positively to a prominent "safety notice", if I saw "No further defects found since July 2023" that would be more encouraging than not for a lot of projects.

There is a solution that's already in use in the Python ecosystem (PyPI). Python projects have a classifiers field. Development status is one of the main types of classifiers. It has 7 stages starting from 'Planning' and ending in 'Inactive'. Honestly, this solution is elegant and simple to implement.

We could an issue for code forges including github to implement it such that it is shown as project metadata along side license, language, etc. Perhaps the project can be automatically marked as inactive if the maintainer(s) don't respond every 3 months or so (of course with provision to easily revert it).

[1] https://pypi.org/classifiers/

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