“in my head the choice is sort of binary in that either this stays in a private git repo and no one ever sees it the end or make it open source and then like maybe somebody can do something with it I'm curious what other people will do with it curiosity more than anything”

Open-sourcing a dead repo is a cheap validation test

After shutting Maybe down, Josh treated open-sourcing as the lowest-stakes possible 'launch' — pure curiosity, zero plan to revive. The repo hit a nerve, tens of thousands of people showed up, and the project came back to life with $1.1M+ in fresh funding within 10 days. Shipping something dead in public can be a cheaper validation test than building something new.