Concepts
The open source concept library
The vocabulary, the data, and the canonical explainers for the concepts every open source developer, maintainer, and engineering manager should know. The pages below are how BreakPoint thinks about the abandonment crisis — bus factor, project lifecycle states, the ADOPTME tag, and the signals you can use to read a project's state from a single repo page.
Start here
Risk metric
Bus factor in open source
The number of maintainers a project can lose before it stalls. In 2026, the median for the top 100 OSS packages is 1. Here's the data, the tools, and how to fix it for the projects you depend on or maintain.
Read the bus factor explainer →
State machine
The 5 states of an open source project
Every project lives in one of five states: Active, NEEDHELP, HANDOFF, ADOPTME, or Archived. The vocabulary, the signals, the 41% revival rate, and how to read a project's state from a single repo page.
Read the lifecycle explainer →
The rest of the library
Empirical
The shape of abandoned projects
When do projects die, and why? The empirical shape of abandonment — across code, writing, art, music, business, learning. The patterns that predict revival.
Universal taxonomy
The 5 states of any project
Active, paused, forgotten, revived, archived — for any project, whether it's code, writing, art, music, home, business, or learning. The general model that the open source lifecycle explainer specialises.
Death pattern
The 90% rule
Why most projects stall in the last 10% — the phase where the work is no longer new. The first 90% is the easy part. The last 10% is where projects die.
Research
The psychology of incomplete projects
The sunk cost fallacy, the "what-the-hell" effect, the Zeigarnik effect. The research behind why we abandon what we start — and what to do about it.
Economic framing
Sunk cost vs sunk potential
Why "sunk cost fallacy" is the wrong frame for abandoned projects. What you actually lose when you walk away is the potential value, not the time spent. The two framings lead to different decisions.
Why these concepts matter
The open source abandonment crisis is a vocabulary problem as much as a resource problem. When a maintainer says "I can't keep doing this" and a user says "this project is dead" and an engineering manager says "this dependency is a single point of failure", they are usually describing the same situation with three different vocabularies. The pages here give you the shared one.
The numbers are real and current: 60% of OSS maintainers have quit or considered quitting, 44% have experienced burnout, the median bus factor for the top 100 packages is 1, and 41% of abandoned projects come back to life when the handoff is done well. These concepts are how we measure the crisis — and how we make the recovery work.
Related reading
Annual report
The State of Abandonment 2026
The 60% / 44% / 1 / 41% numbers, the XZ Utils backdoor, the K8s retirement, and the structural crisis behind all of this.
How-to guides
The full playbook — adopter guide + maintainer handoff guide
When you've read the concepts and want to do something about it: 5-step playbooks for both sides of the handoff.