I love open source, but publishing, maintaining & supporting an open source project can take a lot of effort & time. There can often be expectations that if your project is open then you’re looking to grow it out with added features and contributions.

I quite enjoy building applications to cover my own specific use-cases & needs. These are things I’d like to open source, in the hopes they’ll help others, but they’re not projects I’d want to grow and manage, like I do for BookStack, due to the time commitment required. Instead I’d like to just keep them relatively maintained and up-to-date.

To help set expectations up-front, I’ve been adding this to my READMEs:

Low Maintenance Project

This is a low maintenance project. The scope of features and support are purposefully kept narrow for my purposes to ensure longer term maintenance is viable. I’m not looking to grow this into a bigger project at all.

Issues and PRs raised for bugs are perfectly fine assuming they don’t significantly increase the scope of the project. Please don’t open PRs for new features that expand the scope.

It’s still possible that PRs or issues for big features are opened, but in that case you can just point to the statement as reasonable justification for closing the request early, hopefully without push-back or argument. If someone does want to take the project further, they have the option to just fork it and continue from there.

So far I’ve used this on a few projects including my rss reader app, and a simple system monitoring solution, and so far there’s been no issues.