Sorry everybody, I failed with you

In an ideal world you're right. But most people don't create projects expecting -- or even wanting -- huge success.

1. Sometimes people create a project for themselves but use Github as a convenient place to store the code. I've done that before and found people filing issues against those projects.

2. Sometimes people create a project to scratch a personal itch and put it online in case it helps anyone else. Not in the sense of hoping people will use it but rather than in the "I bought 10 bottles of wine and only drank 9. Help yourselves to the last bottle" sense.

Maybe there should be (maybe there already is) a software license that should better explain the "wrote this for myself. You're free to use it but don't expect support".

3. Some people probably do hope that their project has some, maybe even just small, degree of success but they host in their own user profile because their Github profile is their CV and they're starting new projects in the hope of landing better jobs.

This 3rd group are a particular problem for open source. Not in the sense that they're doing anything wrong -- they're clearly not. But in the sense that you end up with a lot of NIH since the primary reason for a project existing is to boost the CV. So when the primary maintainer moves on, any future contributors will prefer to build their own solution rather for their own CV rather than taking over maintenance of the existing project.

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It should also be noted that not all projects are large enough to warrant their own Github org. Take BurntSushi's stuff. I'd wager the percentage of HN developers who use BurntSushi's code is in the double figures. But there'd be no sense in every one of his projects being it's own org.

This is kind of sad to read, that someone building and maintaining a free product feels compelled to over apologize for want burning out.

It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems like more and more people are demanding higher and higher levels of service for things that they don’t pay much if anything for.

I play a game right now that is in Beta called Dual Universe. Some people paid for Kickstarter packages 5-6 years ago for around 40 bucks. The game has its areas for improvement to be sure, but some of the players are just horrible and abusive to the community. I know they paid 40 bucks for a vision some years back and maybe DU has overproduced a bit, but the abuse of the 40 or so staff that is trying to build an amazing game where you can build anything you can dream of with voxels is just unrealistic.

I feel like Github and co could do a LOT more to help open source project maintainers and contributors rewarded.

They can offer a new subscription model for people with expendable income and companies with benefits, on a per user basis instead of a per project one.

They can offer monetizing issues, e.g. promoting a question or issue report with an X amount of currency.

OS maintainers can create a bot that asks people to contribute financially or to reach out to their employer to do so.

Github can push their sponsors program more, and aim it at companies / "enterprise" sponsors.

Feels like a great opportunity for Github or another website to have these sort of analytics. Seems like quite the complicated task tho. Start small?

There are a lot of facets to open source contributions. One big facet is the whole itch-scratching thing. If you know longer itch, stop scratching. That's ok. Maybe when you stop scratching, it will start to itch again for you or for someone else. If nobody steps up, it just means it doesn't itch enough.

Abandonware is not such a bad thing. It served its purpose for a season, then the world moved on. Nobody's out there trying to breath life into the Apollo program. Or into Mosaic. And that's ok. It doesn't diminish how awesome they were at the time.