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Seth Michael Larson: Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day (Spring 2025)

After thinking about doing so for the past few years I am finally following through on observingVolunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day(abbreviated VRAD), specifically for most of my volunteer open source contributions. I am posting this ahead of the actual day (June 21st in 2025) to give you all reading an opportunity to compile your own list, if necessary.

I've been trying to diversify my sources of dopamine for some time now and while I've done a decent job of picking up new things I have done a "less-than-good" job of explicitly putting down other things. So now it's time to do that instead of pretending I can do it all.

This isn't a sudden change. I've been lucky to work at two places that supported aspects of open source maintenance, both at Elastic and the Python Software Foundation. It has been difficult after a full day of staring at a screen with the GitHub UI to convince myself to do that forjust a few more hoursin my free time.

Recently I removed both GitHub and Slack from my phone, and it feltreally, really, good-- like this change was already overdue.

I made a list of projects I consider myself a "maintainer" like VRAD suggests. Here are the projects I am no longer maintaining in a volunteer capacity:

  • rfc3986
  • h2(andhpack,priority,hyperframe, etc)
  • requests
  • psl(now un-maintained)

Here are the projects that I consider feature-complete and will only be making security-fix releases as necessary going forward:

  • brotlicffi
  • brotlipy
  • hstspreload
  • socksio

And here are the projects that I plan to continue to maintain beyond only security releases:

  • urllib3
  • truststore

I wanted to highlight that publishing this post,even when I haven't contributed meaningfully to some projects in this list in over a year, was still a difficult thing to do. Those flames won't suddenly come back "if only I pretend just a bit longer" and this post is part of making peace with that.

I still love open source software, especially working on security at the Python Software Foundation and all the friends I've met along the way. Big thank you to my friendSumanafor creating Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day.

https://sethmlarson.dev/observing-volunteer-amnesty-day?utm_campaign=rss

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