I think it'd be useful for projects to have a maintainer status report that they update periodically. Something to let people know what kind of interests & commitments the maintainers/authors have for the project. I think we could do better, but for example, a scale of decreasing interest might look like: ACTIVE/MAINTAINED/PERIODIC/INFREQUENT/UNINTERESTED/ABANDONED.<p>Trying to assess motivations I think is core. There's a never ending series of articles on _why, but "What we can learn from _why the long lost open source developer"[1], which drills fairly well into their mis-aligned interests versus the highly industrialized environment about them, showing very different core motivations. Being able to express that personality, of why people are here, what it is they're shooting for, I think is missing context in open source.<p>A more down to earth & near-at-hand example of developer interest might be Tom MacWright, who put projects up for adoption[2] (2016), and started a repo naming their projects that are up for adoption. This is one of the core examples I think of, when it comes to developers trying to express their relationship to their works: these could still be good & useful, but I don't want to take care of them myself.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/readme/featured/why-the-lucky-stiff" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/readme/featured/why-the-lucky-stiff</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28882819" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28882819</a> (3 comments)<p>[2] <a href="https://macwright.com/2016/01/30/adopt.html" rel="nofollow">https://macwright.com/2016/01/30/adopt.html</a> <a href="https://github.com/tmcw-up-for-adoption" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tmcw-up-for-adoption</a>