pull down to refresh
- If it's FOSS and you're a dev and you depend on it: fork it, find other superusers, try to sustain it, get funded (even if it's just gratuity.)
- If you're not a dev and you depend on it: find other superusers, sponsor them.
- If it's closed source: you probably shouldn't be using this (
<insert Stallman face>lol) - Find alternatives
Whatever you do: do not whine about it. That doesn't help.
I am not such a snowflake to whine :)
But I had in the past a nice app, foss, that was quite stable and with the features I needed for my work. Quite a niche application, so not too many alternatives.
Suddenly the dev didn't respond anymore to requests to small bugs or improvements.
I was using it for a while longer but in the end I just give up and move on to other things.
I am trying to find out why some devs (not all ofc) are losing the care at least to respond to old users with a simple: "sorry, I no longer work on this project. Stop using it." Something like that.
I have quit maintaining 3 big FOSS projects in my life, the first of them I did badly, two I did well. In each case it was because I no longer used the software myself.
The bad case, I just stopped working on it. If you're a user of it, move on the moment you see it stagnates for, say, 6 months, especially nowadays.
The good cases were:
- Found a really good maintainer so I transferred repo and package ownership to them. This is still alive today.
- Gave people a much better alternative. Told users to migrate and set a deprecation date 1 year after. Had a little bit fallout but when I archived the repo after a year, there were tons of user reports in public on what to do.
what if I use an app that the dev is not responding anymore?