Guides
The open source handoff playbook
60% of open source maintainers have quit or considered quitting. 44% report burnout. The top 100 OSS packages have a median 1 active maintainer. The handoff is the only real solution. These guides are the playbook — for the maintainer stepping back, and for the developer stepping in.
Start here
For developers
How to take over an abandoned open source project
A 6-step guide for adopting an abandoned or unmaintained project. Find the right project, evaluate it, contact the original maintainer, and ship the handoff without burning bridges.
Read the adopter guide →
For maintainers
How to find a new maintainer for your project
A 5-step guide for maintainers who need to step back. Decide, document, signal, announce, support — the playbook for a graceful handoff that actually works.
Read the maintainer guide →
For maintainers (ending a project)
How to responsibly abandon an open source project
The companion to the handoff guide. When a project should end, not transfer. 6-step process: announce, update the README, cut a final release, deprecate in every registry, write MIGRATION.md, archive. Archive is a pause button, not a delete button.
Read the abandonment guide →
Universal guides — for any project, not just code
BreakPoint now covers any project that someone started and walked away from. These guides apply the handoff playbook to writing, art, music, home, business, and learning.
Side projects
How to revive a side project
6-step playbook for reviving a personal project, weekend hack, or MVP.
Writing
How to revive a writing project
5-step playbook for unfinished novels, nonfiction, articles.
Universal
Finish what you started
The 5 reasons projects die at 90%, and what to do about each.
Universal
When to abandon a project
The 7-question checklist for deciding whether to keep pushing or stop.
Universal
How to hand off any project
7-step handoff process for any project type.
Why these guides exist
Every piece of advice in these guides is the distillation of patterns
that already exist in the open source world — the adopt-me
tag in WordPress, the ADOPTME/HANDOFF pseudo-users
in CPAN, the RFA process in Debian, PEP 541 on PyPI, the
shields.io looking-for-maintainer badge, and the
repostatus.com
ecosystem. We're not inventing a new workflow. We're writing down the one
that already works, with the specific 2026 numbers and tools.
Related reading
Annual report
The State of Abandonment 2026
The 60% number, the XZ Utils backdoor, the Kubernetes Ingress NGINX retirement, and what 2025-2026 taught us about the structural crisis in open source.
See it work
The Hall of Fame — projects that were adopted and shipped
The handoff isn't theoretical. Read the stories of projects that were dropped, adopted, and are now shipping.
Find a project
The feed — abandoned projects looking for a new home
Every project is dropped with a story, a "next steps" section, and an explicit intent to hand off. Find one that fits.