[BjornW]

A similar thing happens in the Open Source WordPress plugin repository.

All of my WordPress plugins are free & Open Source. Most are tiny plugins using functionality (filters, actions) part of WordPress core. Unless WordPress becomes backwards-incompatible they will function perfectly fine for the foreseeable future. From my perspective these plugins are feature complete & unless there's a bug, don't need any attention from me. Sadly the WordPress repository expects me to update the version number or else the plugin will be become less visible in search results and a notice will be placed above the plugin's title stating: "This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress."

So for some of my plugins I occasionally 'bump' the version number to make sure people can still find it in the search & for some plugins I just leave it be because I have better things to do. However it didn't feel quite right to keep people using my work in the dark, so I've added a text to communicate this to them. This is the text from my 'Redirect To Homepage' plugin:

"Is this plugin actively being developed? Yes and no. Let me explain: I consider this plugin to be feature complete and unless bugs are found there will be no development on this plugin. In other words this plugin is in maintenance mode and will be maintained for the foreseeable future. Due to other obligations I’m not always able to keep up with WordPress version’s and updating this readme’s ‘Tested up to’ version number. However, unless WordPress significantly changes the way the login_redirect filter works it should work perfectly fine even though the ‘Tested up to’ might be of a lower version number. As always, when in doubt, test it (and when it does give you issues, feel free to leave a comment)."

I think this balances both interests, those of people using (perhaps depending on) my work as well as my own. A similar approach could be used by commercial app stores to restore autonomy & balance interests.