Resurrecting the Dead

Presented on
* June 20 2025 at NeosConf, Karlsruhe, Germany.
* September 25 2025 at LoopConf, London, United Kingdom.
* June 30 2026 at DrupalCamp Belgium, Kortrijk, Belgium.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Have you ever considered what would happen when a popular open source package is abandoned ?
Now, what about when that package is one of your essential dependencies ?

This scenario is not some abstract scenario for a far away future. Projects get abandoned every day and your dependency might be next... But you can help!
Come & listen to some tales of an accidental maintainer and learn about what you can do to help try and prevent these situations from getting out of hand.

----

The image on the fourth slide is copyright Tristan Elwell and used with permission.
Prints of this image can be ordered via: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/tristan_elwell/curses-inc/

Transcript

1. Resurrecting the Dead Tales of an accidental maintainer Juliette Reinders Folmer Vera Kratochvil
2. Accidental Maintainer ? ▪ Requests with Alain Schlesser ▪ PHP Parallel Lint with Václav Makeš Linnaea Mallette
3. Take Over Community Pressure  Fix CI ✓ Submit Patch 
4. Accidental Maintainer ? ▪ Requests with Alain Schlesser ▪ PHP Parallel Lint with Václav Makeš ▪ PHP_CodeSniffer ©Tristan Elwell
5. You Did What Now ? Linnaea Mallette
6. How Does This Happen ? kai Stachowiak
7. Linnaea Mallette & Circe Denyer
8. Reasons For Abandoning A Popular Project Life happens kai Stachowiak
9. Maintainer Burnout vintagevivids
10. AI Burnout Paul Brennan
11. Now What ?
12. New admin Transfer the repo Fork the repo Let it die Resurrection Scenarios
13. What Does it Mean to Be a Maintainer ? Petr Kratochvil
14. “If something "just" works, it generally means someone in the background is putting a sh*tload of effort into it to keep it running smoothly. Linnaea Mallette
15. Maintaining: Keeping Things Running
16. Maintaining: Envision The Future
17. Open For All: Bug Fixes and New Features
18. Preventing Abandonment Petr Kratochvil
19. Healthy vs Unhealthy Projects
20. Succession Management ▪ Document ▪ Activate ▪ Identify ▪ Coach ▪ Validate ▪ Promote ▪ Funding! Nicky Pe
21. Keys to the Castle ▪ Repo ▪ GH Organisation ▪ Packagist ▪ Access to domains/DNS ▪ Open Collective ▪ Social Media Accounts ▪ Etc George Hodan
22. Best Practices & Lessons Learnt for popular open source projects Vera Kratochvil
23. “Apparently, it is perfectly acceptable for companies and governments to demand that open source software used by millions complies with QA standards, security protocols etc, but it is still regarded as unseemly when the maintainers of that same software ask to be paid… Petr Kratochvil
24. Funding is not Optional
25. Do's ▪ Set up Funding Channels ▪ Dedicated Organisation ▪ Contributing Guide ▪ PRs & Protected Branches ▪ Expand CI/QA ▪ Signalling via Labels ▪ Close Quickly Linnaea Mallette
26. Lessons Learnt Off-GH Contact Pace Yourself Stick to Your Plan Say NO (a lot)
27. Struggles ▪ Slow turn-around on feedback ▪ "good enough" ▪ Lonely ▪ I don't know everything… Michal Spisak
28. PHP_CodeSniffer: Where Are We Now ? Vera Kratochvil
29. Is PHP_CodeSniffer Still Alive ? > 70.000 new dependents
30. Is PHP_CodeSniffer Still Alive ? > 170 M downloads since take-over
31. Is PHP_CodeSniffer Still Alive ? 27 new releases
32. PHP_CodeSniffer 4.0
33. … but funding is down….
34. How You Can Help Know Your Dependencies Contribute Funding
35. Thanks! Any questions ? https://speakerdeck.com/jrf @jrf_nl@phpc.social @jrfnl https://github.com/sponsors/jrfnl