  Creating a successful and sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) project
often depends on the strength and the health of the community behind it.
Current literature explains the contributors' lifecycle, starting with the
motivations that drive people to contribute and barriers to joining OSS
projects, covering developers' evolution until they become core members.
However, the stages when developers leave the projects are still weakly
explored and are not well-defined in existing developers' lifecycle models. In
this position paper, we enrich the knowledge about the leaving stage by
identifying sleeping and dead states, representing temporary and permanent
brakes that developers take from contributing. We conducted a preliminary set
of semi-structured interviews with active developers. We analyzed the answers
by focusing on defining and understanding the reasons for the transitions
to/from sleeping and dead states. This paper raises new questions that may
guide further discussions and research, which may ultimately benefit OSS
communities.
