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Generally agree except in some special cases like Django or Linux. They're both open source and continuous and seem (at least from the outside) to be successful at it. They also have foundations around them, though.

I think the better model for solo passion projects is generally to write your program and declare it "as-is". If people want changes to it, that's what forking is for. If you agree with their changes, you might arrange a pull request but that should be seen more as an exception rather than the rule (for this kind of project). This way the original code evolves in separate branches. Maybe one eventually becomes the de facto source, but being the original creator of the project should confer no automatic responsibility.

One very successful example of this in the wild is the open-source roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Whales wrote the original Cataclysm but ended development of it in 2012, at which point the community forked it and kept development going for the past 8 years so far.




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