Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.
@tante normalize using finished software
@tante And if people want more features, fork it!
Sep 22, 2026, 8:44 AMOr, better, make it easy to add features without needing a fork. Provide clear and stable APIs and hooks for plugging in scripting languages.
No single program can capture 100% of all users' requirements. The goal for a Free Software project should always be:
Once you reach this point, you're done.
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante as someone who tried to do this with SolveSpace: a clear and stable API is the other 270%, in practice
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante (in the end it was never implemented because neither me nor, as far as I know, anyone else, could stomach the dramatic expansion in scope. people just switch to FreeCAD if they need more features in practice, which in my experience at the time was infinitely worse)
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante or in other words: there's a lot to be said for designing for extensibility, but it's an order of magnitude harder design, implementation, and support task, and so outright impossible for someone for whom the base application stretches their skill and experience to the limit
open interchange formats are still very hard in many of the same ways, but not quite as hellishly difficult
@david_chisnall @webbop @tante
Well, I do that for most of my recent personal projects, while being fully aware that I'm likely the only user of that project🤣
I never regret it though, because designing extensible software is fun :)
Sep 22, 2026, 1:43 PM
Sep 22, 2026, 8:27 AM@tante more projects should add a “what-it’s-not” list next to the feature list.
@tante that's the thing missing by almost all software. As example browser with inbuilt games or any other "easter eggs". Software be the software, not a chicken.
@tante So true!
@tante Aren’t most Free Software projects done?
From time to time they are adapted to changes in the environment or otherwise changed expectations, but usually stuff just works.
Maybe a problem is that when we use grep or sed, we don’t realize that these are projects, too, because they don’t make the headlines.
@tante maybe a way to deal with that could be to write more often about the tools that already exist.
I remember how the university provided training all the time about citation management with Zotero, but there wasn’t a single training about bibtex.
Even though that is ingrained into many academic workflows and usually just works.
The mantra of the last 25+ years has been that desktop computing is easy and ubiquitous and all programs should be easy.
Because they are easy, they do not require manuals or good documentation and most importantly, do not require training and education.
The reality is that every field of endeavor is complex and messy and has lots of stuff to learn. Management gravitates to "it looks easier, so it must work better" and this is almost always incorrect.
Meanwhile, many people have adopted the idea that they "aren't good at computers" when in reality they have never been taught and don't even realize what there is to learn.
@dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante It’s possible (but difficult) to design software to be intuitive and easy to use. It’s easier to write good documentation but nobody wants to do it. This is why so many projects give the documentation work to AI now even though it’s not very good. They kind of understand that they are supposed to have documentation but don’t want to do it and don’t *really* understand what the purpose/goal of documentation is.
@MisuseCase @dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante
The only thing worse than no documentation is stale documentation.
Sep 22, 2026, 1:21 PM@MisuseCase
it's hard to write documentation for something you already know
also, people "good with computers" have absorbed so much of the unspoken patterns seen in computing that they mostly get by without documentation and it'a hard for them to figure out which parts may be unobvious to an average person
@dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante
@wolf480pl @dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante A few years ago I was responsible for ensuring security compliance for components of a large project. Doing this work required reviewing documentation of the components. I found that while all the documentation followed a common format, parts were often hastily copy-pasted or entered, and sometimes they were out of date.
/1
@wolf480pl @dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante I would have to chase down someone on the team responsible for the component to get missing/current information. Sometimes the documentation about who was responsible for a component was out of date too, and the person I tried to reach was gone.
When I chased someone down for details about their project they sometimes asked me why Thing A had to be in the documentation anyway, didn’t everyone know Thing A worked like this?
/2
@wolf480pl @dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante I would remind them that the project was a few years old and very large, different people were coming on board or leaving all the time, requirements had changed, and teams working on different things often didn’t talk directly to each other. So when documenting your feature you cannot assume prior knowledge and you need to be explicit about even the “obvious” stuff.
/3
@wolf480pl @dashdsrdash @ArneBab @tante Good documentation is a skill you can learn but it often involves questioning your assumptions and thinking about people outside of yourself and your immediate team. Many people (not just computer people) have a difficult time with that and even find it emotionally uncomfortable.
/end
@tante@tldr.nettime.org corporate brainrot to break things that worked...
@tante ANY software project that is never "done" was badly defined in the first place and suffers from scope creep.
Sep 22, 2026, 12:54 PM@marshalla99 @tante oof! SAY THAT!
@tante YES I am always saying this. Not everything needs indefinite maintenance, and certainly not periodic design refreshes that have become the ultra-frustrating norm.
Sep 22, 2026, 8:40 AMWell, there is TeX (36 years without new features):
The design was frozen after version 3.0, no new feature or fundamental change will be added, so all newer versions will contain only bug fixes.Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features
@tante Not even an open source hot take. Just straight up a software hot take. And it shouldn't be hot, been trying to say the same for years.
@tante "Maintenance mode" is actually good because it stops devs from changing the damn UI every month just to have "kept the project alive"
@howtophil @blogdiva @tante I believe the reason devs/companies make unwanted, unnecessary changes to software and services all the time is to justify charging a subscription fee for those things instead of letting you pay one time to own a copy, like in the old days. The move to subscription billing has created this perverse incentive.
@tante If you don’t have investors breathing down your neck and demanding a high return on their investment, then yes, the product may well seem finished.
@tante I was archiving a load of CDs a while ago and noticed cdparanoia hadn't been updated since 2008. And why should it be? It's achieved its goal and does everything it set out to do. More things need to be like cdparanoia.
@tante I remember seeing people complaining on a Steam forum of a game about the game being "dead". It was a single player game and the developer replied that the game is simply done and finished and the reason it didn't get updates for years is that there are no known bugs to fix.
@tante we already can (and do) do this, not sure what the issue is or where the hot take is?
@tante idk.. Done as no more features, but if there are no bug fixes since a long time, I wouldn't use it.
@leonid @tante what if there are no known bugs? Some stuff is just quite stable. Personally I prefer that over a project adding new features all the time with the risk of introducing new bugs. Sure if the issue tracker is full of bugs and no action that sounds dead. But there are also quite active projects, regular new features, that have an issue trackers full of bugs. but nobody cares about maintaining it's all about new features.
@orava @tante I came across many libraries and applications that hadn't had any commits for months or even years. There were also a lot of issues in the tracker. They are probably abandoned. I would never use them in my projects.
Sometimes, updates are released to fix issues or security vulnerabilities in dependencies.
I think a small, relatively isolated library or project can remain stable indefinitely. However, even these will have some dependencies, such as the OS.
Sep 22, 2026, 9:26 AM@NohatCoder @tante if it is really simple, then you can fork it and fix the issues.
@NohatCoder @leonid @tante the famous Donald Knuth projects, so bug free he personally offered bug-finder cheques that people framed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
Sep 22, 2026, 9:39 AMPeople should fork small project instead of overbloat biggest project
@tante i aspire to write software in a way such that "unmaintained" is a compliment
Sep 22, 2026, 9:58 AM@tante but muh investahs
@tante
It's not without irony that software in theory provided for the possibility of crafting technological objects that could last forever for the first time, while in practice they expire faster than Liz Truss.
@tante same goes for videogames.
Sep 22, 2026, 10:41 AMWhile I don’t disagree with the premise that software that delivers on its original purpose doesn’t need to be endlessly expanded, the reality is that all software lives within an ever-changing ecosystem.
Curl comes to mind as a tightly defined set of functionality that still requires constant work because of new protocols and the need for relentless optimisation.
I’ve seen a lot of software age like warm milk because people thought they could just deploy and forget about it.
@tante fewer apps, more utils, please
@tante When I was a more active participant in the erlang ecosystem, that was one of the nice things about it -- there are some old, good libraries which haven't been touched in years, because they're finished. And people in the community were ready to defend those libraries and that position when anyone expressed reservations about using them because they were old.
Sep 22, 2026, 11:46 AM@tante This is also something for users to take note of. How many 'bug reports' I did not get asking if the project is still alive, or people discrediting software as 'unmaintained' only because the latest release is 1,5y old. There were no new things to fix.
@tante Please help my family get basic necessities and food. Please, even 100£ would be enough for me and my family.
https://chuffed.org/project/149031-give-waleeds-family-a-chance-to-live
@tante I've been thinking about this a lot with a particular client. They keep building out new features, and while they're not bad features, I'm not sure it's actually helping the product.
@tante My hot take … this is not a hot take :KEKW:
@tante
Software cold take: if the government gave grants to open source developers, everything could have been open source and we could have avoided all this bullcrap
Sep 22, 2026, 12:35 PM@tante 100%, although I think the distinction from projects that have been deprioritised into maintenance mode is important. They probably need different names.
@tante I wish corporations would realize this also!
Sep 22, 2026, 12:52 PM🗣THANK YOU!
Drupal should have stopped at 7… maybe 9 and then forked to whatever it is now. they're two completely different products and i’ve resented it ever since. Backdrop (the fork from D7-8) is great, but it doesn't get the money and support Drupal gets.