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As a passionate opensource developer, I produced a lot of software during the years. In some cases, this software became obsolete due to the fact that I moved to another project, and the platforms changed. I frankly don't have time to maintain my past projects anymore, and I don't have many chances to find a maintainer, as my projects are generally very sectorial in nature. In this sense, I expect them to die out of natural selection not only out of lack of personal involvement, but also because they are intrinsically less appealing to a larger audience that could spawn a maintainer.

In simple terms, my productivity does not scale up with respect to my past products.

Do you have any suggestions for this issue? Since "bit rotting" is so frequent in the opensource world, as it moves very fast, I guess there's a lot of stuff out there which is plain obsolete. Should I let my software rot as I move forward in my development targets, or take the effort of keeping it (even barely) alive, even if it does not pay off in terms of users, and personal productivity?

CW as it's definitely subjective.

+4  A: 

Software like any other entity has a shelf life. If no longer needed then it will (should!) die. Unlike other things it will always (well if media survives) be available forever and as such can be resurrected if needed. It need not stay alive.

I saw this many years ago looking at the source code to some termulator. It was a very well thought out and elegant to look at and interesting for a newbie coder to read. However it was obsolete even then. Felt kind of wrong but it was dead!

Move on and enjoy doing the stuff you want to. Your productivity will be decided by how much you enjoy what you are doing.

Preet Sangha
+1. productivity-enjoyable link - verified empirically on recent projects!!
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