Ask HN: If you open source some code, are you responsible for maintaining it?

47 points

11 years ago

This is something I have been wondering for a while. At my company, we depend on a lot of open-source technologies. We expect that someone will keep rails up to date, fix security vulnerabilities etc.

At the same time, I have a lot of projects that I open sourced but have no desire to maintain. Here's an example: http://github.com/egonSchiele/mdpress

This is a simple Ruby script I wrote that is now one of my most starred projects. I haven't used it in a while (I don't make many presentations) but I still keep getting and responding to bug reports. What's my responsibility here? I am happy to open source my code, but I don't want the extra work of maintaining something I rarely use.

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