What to Do When Critical Open Source Projects Go End of Life

Summary

Ninety-eight percent of organizations use open source software (OSS) regularly, according to the Linux Foundation. Open source is pervasive. It’s embedded into the fabric of most applications we use in our daily lives. But it’s getting harder to keep up the pace of OSS version deprecations and end-of-life (EOL) cycles. “The life cycle for open source versions is definitely shortening,” Aaron Frost, co-founder and CEO at HeroDevs, which offers long-term support for deprecated open source, told The New Stack. “In 2025 alone, there are over 100 scheduled EOLs for top open source projects.” These EOLs fall into two main categories: EOLs for minor and major versions, and EOLs for entire projects. An example of the first is the sunsetting of .NET 6, which occurred in late 2024, but many still rely upon it. An example of the latter would be the complete sunsetting of AngularJS by Google in 2021. The world of open source has seen a string of license shifts, shortening version deprecations and outright retirements for popular OSS packages. It’s not uncommon, even for highly used open source projects, to be abandoned without a clear future. “Somewhere in the tree of dependencies, almost all teams will have at least one package that is underfunded, planning a major version update, or is even considering closing its doors,” Timothy Lehnen, CTO of the nonprofit Drupal Association, told The New Stack. Sudden shifts leave developers scratching their heads, hurriedly looking for workarounds, maintaining custom forks or reassessing budgets to support commercial alternatives or long-term support plans. So, what should developers do when an open source they highly depend on goes belly up? When OSS you depend on goes EOL (or worse, completely unmaintained), you need an action plan. Below, we’ll consider how companies can prepare for OSS EOL, what maintainers and vendors are doing to support deprecated projects and offer guidance for developer teams reliant on packages with uncertain fu...