HACKER Q&A
📣 vimax

Examples of projects that died with their core developer


I was thinking about long lived projects and the "bus factor", and it got me thinking about projects that died with a core developer. I can think of projects that have outlived their core developer, but I don't know of any projects that ended because a developer died.

Linux is certainly large enough to outlive Linus.

TempleOS continues to live.

Dwarf fortress might not be maintainable by others if the worst were to happen, but there is a very dedicated community.

Are there any examples of the bus factor actually ending a project?

  👤 tony-allan Accepted Answer ✓
My guess is that most projects die without their original developer, quietly and out of sight.

If you have a group of developers with a common vision and time and users who find the work useful then the project might continue.

Can’t think of examples of such a project ending though.

👤 rurban
perl5 essentially ended with Larry Wall switching to perl6. Don't be fooled by yearly releases, and community bugfixes. It's stagnation and destruction, people leaving in masses. A community does only help with support, but it mostly gets worse.

Examples where a community successfully turned the ship around, are Rust, C++ and PHP. But there it were not the community, it were the companies behind driving improvements.

👤 emteycz
ZeroMQ and other software by the author unfortunately died with him.