The essay puts them into the same group - &quot;established commercial entity .. startup that pivots ... or if you as an individual trying to increase your chances to land your dream job through creating an interesting OSS portfolio&quot;.<p>There are also people like me, the owner and sole employee of a commercial organization, and employees of a company which allows 10% time to, among other thing, work on free software or whatever else interests them.<p>It says &quot;next time you embark on creating an OSS project, consider the following steps to avoid a zombie&quot;.<p>Let me tell you my story. In 2003 I wrote PyRSS2Gen, a Python-based RSS2 generator. It took 2-3 days. I wrote documentation and put it on my web site. It&#x27;s now used in a lot of packages.<p>I get a support question about once or twice a year. At this point the code might as well have been written by a stranger as I don&#x27;t recall the details of how it works. I don&#x27;t want to put more work into it. Which means it&#x27;s a &quot;zombie&quot; according to this essay.<p>Or it&#x27;s a dead weight keeping me from doing other things.<p>The essay implies that there&#x27;s an obligation that I and any other distributor of free code must maintain things in perpetuity. Like unimpressive, I do not like the implicit sense of entitlement.<p>I have also written plenty of other software which are dead ends, but it took experience under deployment to figure out <i>why</i> it was dead end. Am I supposed to somehow withdraw the software from the public eye once I no longer think it&#x27;s useful?<p>There&#x27;s still other software which I developed for a client as free software, which I made available, but which I won&#x27;t develop further unless I get funded for it. I haven&#x27;t touched some of those packages for 5+ years. Do I work on it for free, and <i>not</i> do the the consulting work that pays my bills?