> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.

This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time.

> It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over.

The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer).

I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”