A few months ago we published an article on how to retire. It was followed by my decision to retire Obnam. Today, we will discuss how you know you should retire from a free software project.

Here are some possible reasons:

• It's no longer fun.
• You no longer have time for it.
• It's no longer a useful project.
• It requires hardware you no longer have.
• You don't like the technical decisions made in the project and changing them now would be too much work.
• The project has no users anymore.
• You have a falling out with the other contributors.
• You just don't want to work on the project anymore.
• You win the lottery and can't be bothered to do anything anymore.
• You become enlightened and realise that computers are preventing you from becoming happy, so you give away everything you have, and move into a cave to meditate.
• The project is finished and requires no more work: it has all the features its users need, and all bugs have been fixed.

You may also like the talk Consensually doing things together? by Enrico Zini from the 2017 Debconf.