Thanks, but that's a wrap. tell me more...
Thank you.
To those who wish to read on.
I would say I'm writing this with a heavy heart, but in short I'm writing this with a sigh of relief. I took over the maintenance of Laravel Collective back in 2015 and at that time I had big visions and hopes for the code. I began by having a two hour phone call with Adam Engebretson to get to know him before I took on any controls and we occasionally still chat.
I had a couple others join in shortly after to help but as can be expected I and they got busy. When I set up the new site I added ads to it thinking, in short, it could raise some cash and this project could at least grow. It's never made more than $20 in a single month. I run the site on a digital ocean server for $5 a month. I have time and time again discussed with friends and community members about the state of these packages, and this project as a whole.
When I reflect on the state of these packages and the Laravel community I see a handful of packages which have better alternatives available and they all have active maintainers. I see a community that is focused on moving forward and dropping older patterns of coding. When I look at these packages I see old patterns that have not moved forward with the community.
This code is fully open source under MIT license. Anyone can freely take it and begin their own journey, it will be a journey that belongs to them. Given that there have recently been actors who have entered malicious code into NPM repositories I feel like the risk is too high to simply hand someone the keys to soo many application internals. Laravel Collective packages are used by many apps out there but many of which are using these packages without reviewing their changes. I have only ever received demands to deliver updates faster, and been given flack for not responding to harassing emails etc. Given this pattern, I think it's best to retire these packages rather than potentially open unsuspecting applications to a potential attack.
I'd like to say thank you to those who offered PRs and helped move these packages forward.
Regards,
Matt