Comment by gameswithgo

5 years ago

Sometimes when a package gets very popular other people step up to help, or take over. Other times the maintainer has a mental breakdown or just disappears.

> Sometimes when a package gets very popular other people step up to help, or take over. Other times the maintainer has a mental breakdown or just disappears.

It sounds like this author is looking for a third option, one that doesn't involve people management (1) or ghosting (2), and as far as I can tell, no mechanism for this exists that doesn't violate the current tenets of open source.

  • Correct. There's basically nothing in either the mechanics of open source nor the dominant open-source philosophies that says "We need to be able to throttle use of the software to provide good user experience."

    A direct consequence of open source is that the good user experience burden falls to the consumer, not the producer. If someone wants control over the user experience, they want a closed-source model.