This attitude is forcing to ‘fork it’ approach, which is causing a lot of duplicated effort in practise, instead if you feeling like ‘not worth to maintain (can be by any reason, personal, lack of time, burnout), stepping down as maintainer and giving flag to someone else to carry is much more productive. But usually we witness, burned-out maintainers still sticking to their projects.
I would put it this way:<p>For maintainers: if you don't want people to act like you promised them anything, don't put up a fancy website showing how wonderful it is and what its best features are.<p>Instead, do what you can to <i>discourage</i> people from using your software. Tell people how crappy it is, that you could abandon it at any time, and so on.<p>Making it version 0.15 alpha might not be enough to counteract a marketing message that makes it sound like the greatest thing since mobile phones.
> <i>In practise, however, when there are issues, maintainers often work quickly to resolve them and apologise in the same way as a company does. This is one of the biggest causes of burnout.</i><p>Nonsense. This is what FOSS maintainers crave: someone cares about their project and has a real problem: <i>call to action!</i><p>It's the <i>cure</i> for burnout.<p>> <i>For maintainers: if you’re not enjoying most of your work on a project, don’t do it anymore.</i><p>If your regular day job is software developer, and you're not even enjoying your side project, then you're basically burned out from development, which is a bigger problem.<p>If the FOSS project is in fact a piece of crap that you hate (because, say, you're now 10X the developer compared to when you made important (mis-)decisions in that project that are difficult to undo now), then ... just stop. What's the big deal.