Sometimes you want to hang things to your wall, and be done with it.

I'd personally do the same. I wouldn't want to be bothered by the future maintainers' choices and get feedback/flak for it. It's a well-known and well-respected way to cycle the name with a "-ng" or "-nx" prefix to signal that this is the newer project with a different set of maintainers.

Being MIT, while is not my favorite license, doesn't give free license to grab and run with things.

Honestly, in my eyes, 3.8K or 38K stars mean nothing, because Open Source is not about you [0], to begin with.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

It is reasonable to ask for a follow-up project/fork to take a different name. Naming your project, e. G., pgbackrest-ng, does not sound too onerous of a requirement and clearly communicates to users that maintainers have changed (see also paperless ng/ngx as good examples of such a change).

Finding a successor is also not easy nor cheap (in regards to time).

> I'm sure with a 3.8k stars repo you'll find competent people willing to continue the work.

Oh yeah, I'm sure you will find lots of competent people. Like Jia Tan, for example. I've heard he is very competent.

You'll also find plenty of potential malware injectors too, and who would want the responsibility of trying to vet a successor and have to work out the difference?

Because you will attract people who will want to take advantage of the trust these 3.8k stars signal to some people, for example, by means of supply chain attacks.

There's no way to know if a new maintainer will live up to whatever standards they've kept to date. Archiving should be the default decision, unless there's formal and elaborate handover.

A maintainer that is mainly motivated by the 3.8k stars aspect is probably not the person you want. Working on critical OSS software is fun until it's not, especially when you are not paid for that work.

Because that rug pulls your users.

3.8k stars and the name is years of built up trust with you, not with the person you gave it to.

Why is it the responsibility of the person working for free?

Why is it never the responsibility of the people using it?

If anyone cares enough they will. People didn’t care enough to pay, so maybe no one cares enough to fork and be the new unpaid custodian

Those people can just as easily fork it and make a new name then. Otherwise you end up with situations where it's actually an entirely new thing under new developers under the same name. Even riskier in the age of the "AI clean rewrite"

They are not really forbidding the use of the name (unless they have registered a trademark), they probably simply want to avoid confusion.