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Manorrock Sustainability Initiative: Final Chapter

December 31, 2025

Today marks the conclusion of the Manorrock Sustainability Initiative, which began on April 14, 2025. As we close this chapter, I want to thank everyone who participated in this important transition and reflect on what we’ve accomplished together.

What We Set Out to Do

Nine months ago, we launched an initiative to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Manorrock project ecosystem. The goal was clear: invite passionate developers to become maintainers of projects they valued, ensuring continued quality and support while enabling community ownership.

For the Piranha projects specifically, we sought to transition them to an open source foundation where they could benefit from broader community governance and long-term institutional support.

What We Achieved

Over these past months:

The Difficult Reality

I must be honest: beyond Piranha, there was no engagement. No maintainers stepped forward, no questions were asked in the GitHub issues, no community discussions emerged. The silence was complete and unambiguous.

This is the harsh reality of open source sustainability that we must acknowledge openly. These projects, despite being functional and documented, simply didn’t have the community demand or interest needed to sustain them. That’s a difficult truth, but an important one.

The Path Forward

As of today, December 31, 2025:

Reflections on Open Source Sustainability

This initiative reinforced several important lessons about open source sustainability:

  1. Finding Maintainers Is Hard: Even with clear documentation, willing support, and active outreach, finding committed maintainers is incredibly difficult
  2. Most Projects End: The reality is that most open source projects eventually reach their conclusion, and often with little fanfare
  3. Zero Interest Means Zero Value: Complete silence from the community is a clear signal that these projects no longer serve a need
  4. Don’t Preserve What No One Wants: Keeping unmaintained code accessible indefinitely serves no purpose if no one is using it
  5. The Long Tail Dies: The vast majority of open source projects fade into obscurity, and that’s the natural order of things

Gratitude

I want to express my sincere gratitude to:

What Happens Next

The Manorrock website will continue as a historical reference. The manorrock-attic repositories will be made private on January 1st, 2027, and permanently deleted on January 1st, 2028.

For Piranha, the Eclipse Foundation now stewards these projects, with the final administrative transfers of the website and domain completing in the coming weeks. Good luck in the pond, Piranha!

Closing Thoughts

This initiative didn’t end the way I hoped. I had envisioned projects finding enthusiastic new maintainers, communities forming around transferred codebases, and the Manorrock ecosystem continuing under new stewardship. The reality proved more sobering.

But there’s value in this outcome too. It’s a reminder that open source sustainability is genuinely challenging, that maintainer burnout is real, and that we as a community need to think carefully about how we support the long tail of projects that make up our ecosystem.

The Manorrock projects served their users well for many years. They solved real problems, shipped working code, and contributed to the broader Java and cloud native ecosystems. That they’re now being archived doesn’t erase that contribution—it simply means their active chapter has concluded.

To anyone considering starting an open source project: go for it. Create, share, and contribute. But also plan for sustainability from the start, and recognize that it’s okay if your project eventually reaches its natural end. Not every project needs to last forever to have been worthwhile.

Thank you all for being part of this journey. The code remains, the lessons learned persist, and the community continues forward.

For questions about archived projects or the Piranha transition, please refer to the respective GitHub repositories.