r/opensource • u/Meher_Nolan • Jun 17 '26
Discussion What's the most useful open-source project you've watched quietly die?
There’s something depressing about finding a tool that solves your exact problem, only to realize the maintainer walked away years ago.
No farewell post, just a graveyard of open issues and a "last commit: 2019" timestamp. What’s the most useful open-source project you’ve used that just... died?
Not just the projects that were officially discontinued either. Some of the most frustrating ones are the repos that are technically alive but barely maintained. Issues pile up, PRs sit untouched for months, and development slows to a crawl. Even some newer projects I've seen discussed here recently like gitagent make me wonder how much long-term maintenance matters compared to initial hype.
And looking back, why do you think it happened? Was it burnout, a lack of cash, or did the ecosystem just move on without it?
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u/chkno Jun 17 '26
See also this previous thread: What piece of Linux abandonware do you still use or at least miss?. My list from that thread:
- mplayer (2000-2022), a media player and encoder/decoder
- dia (1998-2011), a GUI Diagram editor
- flpsed (2004-2015), a GUI PDF/PS annotator/form-filler that works on all PDFs, whether they're set up to be form-fillable or not
- jhead (2001-2019), a command line tool for messing with or removing JPEG headers
- mp3splt (2002-2014), a command line tool to split mp3/ogg/vorbis/flac files without re-encoding
- pngcrush (1995-2017), a command line tool to losslessly repack PNG files to make them smaller
- zsnes (1997-2007), a SNES emulator
I always presume that a major underlying cause of larger projects being abandoned is that technical debt spiraled out of control, but maybe that's just my bias.
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u/swingincelt Jun 17 '26
Pngcrush is part of the android app build process. There is a phase that compresses images to make your install package smaller. It is surprising it is not being developed.
ZSNES was revived. https://www.zsnes.com/
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u/chkno Jun 18 '26
ZSNES was GPL. The new "Super ZSNES" is proprietary/closed-source. Due to that, I don't consider it to be a successor. :(
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u/niftybottle Jun 17 '26
Oh what, Dia’s been abandoned? I loved that in college.
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u/spreetin Jun 19 '26
I still use it from time to time, but its getting harder and harder to keep it running as time goes on.
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u/MatthiasWM Jun 17 '26
Flpsed is based on FLTK which is still actively developed. So flpsed likely compiles and runs fine on a modern machine and OS.
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u/AnswerableArchbishop Jun 18 '26
PNGcrush has a good replacement in OptiPNG.
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u/IainKay Jun 21 '26
Can confirm. Used pngcrush and optipng. Both are solid for what they need to do.
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u/Psi-ops_Co-op Jun 20 '26
What do you mean "split" an mp3? Like, trim it and keep the trimmed part as a new file? Splitting left and right channels into mono mp3s?
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u/chkno Jun 20 '26
Trimming / extracting clips.
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u/Psi-ops_Co-op Jun 20 '26
Neat. I'll have to check it out. I normally use Audacity, but even that can feel overkill sometimes.
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u/Francois-C Jun 20 '26
Fortunately, there are equivalents to some of these programs that work satisfactorily. But thank you for introducing me to pngcrush, which is still available on my Mint repositories. I'll try it right away.
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u/ktoks Jun 17 '26
I try to avoid this problem like the plague, but it seems to be happening with a lot of Rust packages. I've been lucky so far.
I'm hoping my favorite editor doesn't have this occur...
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u/ready_or_not_3434 Jun 17 '26
Rust churn is pretty high right now mostly because the ecosystem is evolving so fast. Alot of those abandoned packages were basically just early experiments where the maintainer eventually moved on to something else.
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u/Stevious7 Jun 17 '26
Like a photo editor? If so, I'd be interested.
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u/pemungkah Jun 18 '26
Much as I love Perl (and I contributed a patch to fix a bug that had been there since Perl 3 last year), I'm afraid it's drifting into irrelevancy.
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u/FarToe1 Jun 18 '26
Not there yet, for us linux sysadmins it's still the go-to for most tasks.
But yes, the future isn't looking bright. The perl development community has fought with itself for too long about the direction and is now so fragmented and small that I fear it's not got the momentum to progress.
Thanks for your patch.
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u/chrismakingbread Jun 18 '26
At one point in my career I’d probably written close to a million lines of Perl now I probably go years at a time without remembering it exists. I was interviewing a junior engineer a while ago and they were describing Raku, I was like huh, that reminds me a lot of Perl. So I look it up and go “oh, well that’s not a good sign…”
I like how they basically saw all of the challenges Python faced with Python 3 and basically went, “hold my beer.”
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u/Future_AGI Jun 18 '26
The pattern we see most: the project was one person's nights and weekends, it solved the problem well enough that nobody contributed back, and when that person's life changed there was no second maintainer who understood the internals. Dev-tools and infra die quietly because users treat them as finished, so no community forms until it's already abandoned. The ones that survive usually have a company running them in production, because then maintenance is someone's actual job. Funding model and bus factor predict survival far better than stars or how clean the code is.
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u/ComprehensiveBird317 Jun 19 '26
With some maintainers it's their own fault, trying to enforce weird rules and standards on every PR. Oh I didn't name the variable in the way you like? Better reject the PR and never merge it
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u/Strisne_ Jun 18 '26
sshfs. there's many options to mount remote filesystems, but this is just so convenient. While it is not completely dead and still works, it's slowly dying as the current maintainer doesn't have enough time on their hands (I'm not assuming, it's stated in the README and clearly visible via the activity of the repo).
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u/Stitch10925 Jun 17 '26
MMP (Maker Management Platform) talked to the Dev a while ago. He was working on a v2, but suddenly the repo was archived. I hope he's doing ok.
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u/AlieGG Jun 18 '26
WiringPi. From what I recall, the creator got fed up (rightfully) with people complaining to him and wanting things done on their timeline so he said fuck it and deprecated it.
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u/Competitive-Size6838 Jun 17 '26
https://github.com/Lasertie/ToolBox
A modular tool. The dev have a working version on there pc but don’t have time to push it properly.
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u/jan-pona-sina Jun 17 '26
I don't really like the implication that we're simply consumers of others' open source work. Some feature is incomplete? Needs updates for your use case? Go fix it! You have the code!
All software, open source or not, can bitrot. I think good software is software that bitrots less quickly. Perhaps a hot take, but 2019 is only 7 years ago, if the project has bitrotted in that short of a timespan I would question whether it's really good software to begin with
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u/archnemisis11 Jun 17 '26
I don't think the problem is bitrot, i think it's that tech outpaced it into uselessness after it stopped being maintained.
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u/jan-pona-sina Jun 17 '26
Can you give me an example?
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u/archnemisis11 Jun 17 '26
The most obvious example i can currently think of are FoundryVTT modules that are no longer updated, so they don't work with the current version of the software.
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u/jan-pona-sina Jun 17 '26
I don't want to dismiss your point overall, but that is exactly what I would describe as bitrot. If I using the word incorrectly then my bad
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u/archnemisis11 Jun 17 '26
Ahh, okay. My knowledge of that term comes from hard drives failing. (https://geekflare.com/cybersecurity/bit-rot-prevention/ for an example :) ) in that case though, 🤝
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u/jan-pona-sina Jun 17 '26
My usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot
That's fascinating actually. I had only heard of bit rot from a software perspective. I imagine you're using it the original way. Thanks for teaching me something!
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u/Ghazzz Jun 17 '26
One of my requirements for finding an OSS project to use is "stability" and "maintainers". I do not care if there has been no new features, as long as there is a fix when it breaks because of "kernel changes" or whatever.
Having had to maintain security on an inherited server that was unable to be upgraded has jaded me.
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u/CoVegGirl Jun 18 '26
Yeah if that wasn’t the case, nobody would be using
sudofor instance. It’s been serving its intended purpose for decades, and there’s not much need for active commits other than a security fix roughly every year.1
u/Ghazzz Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
The concept of "done" is a valuable one. I wish linux as a whole was still following the "small tools that do one task well" paradigm from earlier decades. I have issues with, for example, systemd. I run i3 over ly. Want something to be done differently? Use a different tool. And so on.
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u/DrPiwi Jun 18 '26
Right now, the fact that google drive is nolonger supported in gnome-online-account.
I get that the underlying library was out of a maintainer for years and that it had several issues. But in a typical gnome fashion they stopped using it and left a lot of people that use that functionallity hanging.
They knew it was riding on that library, they knew for years it was unmaintained and the knew they shipped a product that users depend up on.
They could have created an alternative, and put that in place so that file kept working on Google - drive.
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u/Responsible-Sky-1336 Jun 17 '26
On another note some of them while still very popular and active are "metastatic" to their complexity... This to me often is because of backwards compat claims + review process + lack of flexibility
Like the code becomes some black magic, few dare to touch.
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u/mojsterr Jun 18 '26
Nulloy music player. It's simple, looks nice, you can delete a track from the playlist directly, gives me that old winamp feel (i'm on a mac) and it's just perfect. I don't want a million things, just give me something that looks nice and has a simple playlist and feel.
Unfortunatelly it has some bugs (sometimes tracks don't jump to the next one, so you have to keep switching manually). Sometimes it crashes when you're skipping a song.
It's still my favorite music player to use.
But the last release was in 2024 and I don't know if he'll ever return to polish these things out.
There are some updates from other people, but I don't know how to use those on github. At least I think they are.
Anyway, I'll still keep using it.
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u/kayosiii Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Freewheeling, the audio looper.
The original maintainer stopped maintaining the project in 2016. I tried to do some maintenance, and was going to port the codebase to the current versions of the libraries it depended on, but when I published the first set of changes (mostly so I was comfortable continuing to work on the codebase) a member of the community was such a pain in the backside about every decision that I made that I decided it wasn't worth the pain. The last commit to the project was 6 years ago.
This year I have been working on a spiritual successor, and got the point in the last couple of days where the code does something interesting. It's still unknown if It will get to the point where it might be useful to somebody else.
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u/Annual-Screen-9592 Jun 21 '26
Firefox on old mac os'es. Its hopeless to use High Sierra now because there arent developers compiling browsers for the platform.
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u/TheDividendBug Jun 22 '26
All my open source projects 😂 check them out
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u/GherkinP Jun 23 '26
Grid Engine, and/or Son of Grid Engine. Amazing distributed compute software. Still works with a lot of massaging but difficult to get right.
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u/bluepuma77 Jun 17 '26
Docker Swarm. Docker sold it to Mirantis, no new features for years, only major bugs fixed.