Why even think about transitioning leadership?
Not all projects are forever, but once code is put out under an open source license, it is out there forever. While it’s perfectly okay if a project sunsets (something we will discuss in Chapter 14, Sunsetting an Open Source Project), if the project is actively being used or has a vibrant community, bringing new leadership into a project is important for its sustainability.
There are many reasons why projects need to think about transitioning leadership, but there are three main patterns we tend to see that projects encounter: career change, project leaders nearing retirement, and a project stalling. Let’s start with one of the most common: the leader has a career change.
Career change
In my post-university career up to this point, I’ve worked for four different organizations (which in tech is a really low number over 20 years). And my career focus changed over that time as well, as I spoke about when chronicling...
