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OpenSource usually works like this: you write something either because you're paid to do so or because you need it yourself. When the incentive to maintain it is gone, the project may sit idle.

Later, when someone else needs the same thing, instead of starting from scratch and spending months or years reaching the same goals, they can build on the work that already exists and move it forward.

In the Bitcoin and adjacent ecosystem, things are a bit unusual since people often rebuild the same stuff over and over. Just look at how many javascript nostr libraries are there, we should invite people to fix/fork or adopt existing projects and use licenses that incentive doing that for profit (like MIT, BSD, CC0 etc).

we should invite people to fix/fork or adopt existing projects and use licenses that incentive doing that for profit (like MIT, BSD, CC0 etc).

Reviving poorly maintained software is a massive headache though! I've done it. Took me 1.5 year of full time work as the new maintainer and a varying set of 4-6 collaborators during that time, willing to spend some time on it too, to remove tech debt / quirks / upstream dependency API changes... The reason I did that was because this software still had a ton of active users and building from scratch and then offering migration would have been even more costly.

However, I would not do it again. Or at least not pick up something that has been shelved for nearly 2 years.

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