In 2023, many websites and (open source) projects that have been with us for a long time have waved goodbye, either retired, stopped, EOL, or closed down...
The founder of open source ROM Mokee announced the end of the project
Mokee, the largest non-profit open source ROM project in China, officially announced its closure on January 7, 2023. All firmware on the Moqu download page has been backed up to SourceForge. Martin Longzhu, the author of the project, said in an article, "The era of flashing the phone has actually ended a long time ago. I have been undecided for a long time just in the hope that the magic will last a little longer, but what should come will eventually come."
Magic open source project 20121212 ~ 20230107
Network framework AFNetworking stops maintenance
After being discontinued for nearly three years, AFNetworking, a network framework suitable for multiple Apple operating systems (iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS), officially announced its deprecation and discontinued maintenance on January 17, 2023. The original repository will be retained permanently as an archive repository.
AFNetworking recommends that developers migrate to Alamofire, a network framework written 100% in Swift, also developed by the Alamofire Software Foundation.
Developers received death threats and project stopped development
Due to excessive harassment and even death threats, Tahlreth, the developer of the AetherSX2 software, announced in January 2023 that the development of the project would be suspended indefinitely.
"AetherSX2 has always been a fun hobby for me, not for profit. There is no point in continuing to develop a project that is no longer fun."
AetherSX2 is the best PlayStation 2 emulator (no one) on the Android platform. Users can continue to download and use AetherSX2, but there are no further plans for development of the application.
Problems piled up, GIF screen recording tool Peek stopped development
The developers of the GIF screen recording tool Peek officially announced the end of development of the project in January 2023, mainly due to some technical challenges faced when running on Wayland. The only way to solve the problem is to completely rewrite the application in a different way and with a different UI, but "currently Peek has almost no resources to reuse."
The developer stated that he was not interested in developing a brand new project, so he made the decision to abandon the project.
Author of aardio programming language: Because his wife has cancer, he no longer has the energy to maintain the project
The author of the aardio programming language wrote that because his wife has cancer, he no longer has the energy to maintain the project. aardio is a programming language that focuses on desktop software development. It is small, light and fast, with a size of only 6.5MB and extremely low learning and use costs. Although aardio is small, it provides an amazing number of open source standard libraries and extension libraries - these libraries are basically implemented by pure aardio code.
All libraries of aardio are basically written by the author alone, and have been actively updated for 17 years.
Developer of open source project Touca shuts down
Pejman Ghorbanzade, the founder of the open source testing tool Touca, announced the official bankruptcy of his company in March 2023. The depressed market environment was a main reason for Touca's collapse.
Touca was founded by Pejman Ghorbanzade in 2021 and open sourced under the Apache-2.0 license in 2022-5. Touca helps engineering teams discover unintended side effects caused by routine code modifications. It compares the behavior and performance of software to previous trusted versions and visualizes the differences in near real-time.
After the collapse of the Touca company, the Touca open source project will continue to exist and remain open source. Pejman Ghorbanzade said that he will continue to maintain the project and start looking for new opportunities.
Qt 5.15 LTS has ended standard support
Qt 5.15 LTS, the last minor version of the Qt 5 series, officially ended standard support on May 26, 2023.
Qt 5.15 LTS is a long-term support release with a three-year standard support period. The last patch version was Qt 5.15.14 released on May 25, 2023, and standard support terms apply to commercial customers with older licenses.
War, epidemic, inflation, resource website RARBG announced closure
Affected by war, epidemics, inflation and other factors, the resource website RARBG announced its closure in mid-2023.
RARBG is a well-known BitTorrent website that provides many high-quality torrent resources such as movies, TV series, music, games, and software. Founded in 2008 and based in Bulgaria, it has become one of the most beloved sites in the BitTorrent community.
Due to severe shortage of funds, another popular open source project announced that it will stop feature development
After completing the release of version 3.0.0 of the project, DRC, the lead developer of libjpeg-turbo, said that due to lack of funds, its future feature development may be limited and there may never be a libjpeg-turbo 3.1 version.
He will continue to fix bugs in libjpeg-turbo and release bug-fixed versions in the 3.0.x release series; but there will be no more libjpeg-turbo 3.1 release series unless the project receives more general funding.
libjpeg-turbo is a JPEG image codec that uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, AVX2, Neon, AltiVec) to accelerate baseline JPEG compression and decompression on x86, x86-64, Arm and PowerPC systems, as well as x86, x86 Progressive JPEG compression for -64 and Arm systems.
The application "Li Tiaodiao" that automatically skips opening screen ads will stop updating indefinitely
The author of "Li Tiaotiao" announced on the public account in August 2023 that it would stop updating indefinitely. The reason was that he received a letter from a lawyer of a certain group, saying that the "Li Tiaotiao" APP was suspected of unfair competition and had an impact on its browsers. And requested that "Li Tiaotiao" be removed from the entire network within 48 hours.
"Li Tiaodiao" is an Android auxiliary application that uses accessibility permissions to skip APP on-screen advertisements. It does not require an Internet connection and is free to use. In addition to "Li Tiao Tiao", other similar open-screen advertising applications also received letters from lawyers during the same period, such as "Great Sage Purification", "One Finger Zen" and "Ding Xiaotiao".
Microsoft Officially Announces: Visual Studio for Mac Retired
Microsoft announced the retirement of Visual Studio for Mac in August 2023. In the future, the development team will focus on enhancing Visual Studio and VS Code and optimizing them for cross-platform development.
Effective August 31, 2024, Visual Studio for Mac will no longer receive any support. At that time, Visual Studio for Mac will only provide legacy installations through my.visualstudio.com for users who have subscribed to Visual Studio, but will no longer provide service or maintenance.
After Visual Studio for Mac is retired, Microsoft will still provide alternatives for Mac developers, such as C# Dev Kit for VS Code and other extensions.
Open source rich text editor wangEditor suspended for maintenance
Wang Fupeng, the author of the open source Web rich text editor wangEditor, announced in August 2023 that he would suspend project maintenance. The main reason is that the author currently has no energy to maintain wangEditor, and "the recent industry situation is not very good, so let's work hard to make money first."
He also welcomes someone to take over the maintenance of wangEditor, but they need to pass a preliminary assessment: answer 10 issues in the issues list.
After 28 years, Microsoft plans to eliminate WordPad in Windows
Microsoft announced in September 2023 that it planned to deprecate WordPad in a future Windows update. The company recommends Microsoft Word as an alternative for rich-text documents such as .doc and .rtf, and Windows Notepad for plain-text documents such as .txt.
WordPad is a basic text editing application that allows users to create and edit documents with formatted text and contain links to images and other files. It has been included with Windows systems since the release of Windows 95 in 1995, providing users with a basic word processor and document editor integrated into the operating system.
Linux 4.9 is officially EOL, ending the 6-year LTS cycle
After more than 6 years of long-term support, the Linux 4.9 kernel series has reached end-of-life with the Linux 4.9.337 update.
Linux kernel 4.9 was released on December 11, 2016, which brought share ranges and copy-on-write support for the XFS file system, a hardware latency tracker for detecting firmware-induced delays, support for the Greybus bus from Project Ara Support, a more efficient BPF analyzer, a new optional BBR TCP congestion control algorithm, a virtual mapped kernel stack and other features.
Since it is an LTS version, Linux 4. is widely used in production environments, such as mass production equipment/hardware driven by the Linux 4.9 operating system.
MySQL 5.7 is officially EOL on 2023.10.21
MySQL has become the most widely used open source database among Chinese users, with the 5.7 version having the highest proportion of users. According to statistics in the report, MySQL 5.7 users account for as high as 47% in China. At that time, these users will face choices on how to respond to EOL events.
In fact, in 2020, some organizations reminded users that MySQL 5.7 will reach its end of service in 2023 according to the life cycle. At that time, this incident also triggered some discussions in the MySQL community and DBA circles about the security of open source projects. Three years later, the problem of the crying wolf is finally facing us officially.
JS tool library lodash closes all issues and public PRs
The old JS tool library lodash closed all issues and tagged them with "issue bankruptcy". In addition, it also closed all public PRs, saying that it was unable to handle them and closed them down.
UWP, which carries Microsoft’s cross-platform ecological dream, is dying
Developers discovered that Microsoft's latest Windows 11 Canary Build 25987 preview version has begun to provide two versions of XAML Shell service. The new version is directly based on Win32 + XAML. The UWP that once had high hopes has disappeared in the new version.
For more review of the year's major events, check out the "2023 China Open Source Developer Report" .
