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Ask HN: Examples of projects that died with their core developer

3 points by vimax ↗ HN
I was thinking about long lived projects and the "bus factor", and it got me thinking about projects that died with a core developer. I can think of projects that have outlived their core developer, but I don't know of any projects that ended because a developer died.

Linux is certainly large enough to outlive Linus.

TempleOS continues to live.

Dwarf fortress might not be maintainable by others if the worst were to happen, but there is a very dedicated community.

Are there any examples of the bus factor actually ending a project?

6 comments

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rurban
perl5 essentially ended with Larry Wall switching to perl6. Don't be fooled by yearly releases, and community bugfixes. It's stagnation and destruction, people leaving in masses. A community does only help with support, but it mostly gets worse.

Examples where a community successfully turned the ship around, are Rust, C++ and PHP. But there it were not the community, it were the companies behind driving improvements.

_448
> Examples where a community successfully turned the ship around, are ... C++

What are you talking about?

rurban
That the initial C++ was a complete hogdepodge mess, accepting every stupid proposal, and only after several years with proper standardized community proposals, it became Modern C++. Still a mess but better and almost readable.
tony-allan
My guess is that most projects die without their original developer, quietly and out of sight.

If you have a group of developers with a common vision and time and users who find the work useful then the project might continue.

Can’t think of examples of such a project ending though.

emteycz
ZeroMQ and other software by the author unfortunately died with him.
_448
If I remember correctly, the author started an improved version of 0mq by developing nanomsg(now nng)?