It's not on anyone to set up your favourite "governance" system. If anyone honestly wants to keep maintaining or using it the code is still there.
replyPart of the social contract of putting a free software project up for public use and convincing Microsoft to host it for free (!) is indeed that you're going to maintain it in good faith for the people who consume it, and that if you can't you'll make a good faith effort to help the people who do.
replyThere are good and bad ways to extract yourself from maintainership obligations. This is the bad way.
No, there is no social contract here. Microsoft gives free hosting because it's cheap and also provides a path to their paid offerings. People share stuff they work on for fun, to help flesh out their resume, to get help, etc. There's no reason for a maintainer not to drop a project in a heartbeat if it becomes the slightest bit of a burden.
replyThere are no maintainership obligations unless someone pays you for them.
replyNo it's not.
replyAlso read the link. This is apache 2 licensed. Even in whatever imaginary world where there is such a social contract, there is thankfully a legal contract that includes disclaimer of warranty.
Sorry but this is an outrageous perspective, at no point does git init / git push am I committing myself to a social contract, in fact there’s probably a license that states no warranty and no support is to be expected… maintainership obligations gtfo if you’re not here paying for support
replyWhile most startups fail eventually, failure in less than a year with over 7 million dollars is not the expected median. It’s the exact sort of thing that due diligence is supposed to prevent.
replyAlso the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.
That's why either VCs confused moat with bot farms and farmed stars over solving genuine problems or they just blindly invested based on founders track record no matter what. To me both are really by product vibe coding hype and chatgpt killing wrappers.
replyAre there cases when VC investors actually went after founders for fraud or embezzlement or misrepresenting the business or something like that?
replyAt least the repo is still available. Anyone can fork and carry on, create a community, etc.
replyWhich toys exactly were taken? The repo seems open source, is any component missing?
replyIn response to sibling:
> It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want
replyYes, that's exactly what it means!
The project name, its community center and hosting environment, the active participation and consent of the copyright holders of the software was withdrawn. This is a dead project, we can all see it. If you want to use it and contribute and get help, you have no where to go.
reply"It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want" is a specious and unhelpful attitude, and it tells me that you, like the owners of this thing, are not to be trusted to manage such a thing.
The project is Apache2 licensed. You can literally do anything you want with the code. Stop trying to push guilt on people for no longer providing free services.
replyI suppose you can ask them for a refund.
replythe only reason to ever fork a project in earnest is because the original project owners are not willing or able to cooperate or accept patches. in other words you fork because you have nowhere else to go. exactly the situation we have here.
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