Well, Firestarter's documentation was updated in 2010 (bottom of the page), which implies that they still intend to support it. So I wouldn't consider it discontinued outright.

Not according to the Manual itself. If you opened the PDF, you will notice 2005-01-07 as the date. Also, the copyright notice is for 2004. Often open-source projects die out if there are no releases for 2-3 years. For this given project there were no releases for at least 7 years: it's probably bug-ridden with security vulnerabilities, a bad sign for a firewall.

This said, I have no dog in this fight. :)

To be honest, I'm reluctant to make a judgement on whether or not an application is discontinued, unless the creators themselves declare that they've discontinued it.

May I kindly renew my request to mark Firestarter as discontinued?

For example, I was very surprised to see Impressive marked as discontinued, with the following message:
"This application has been discontinued ?
Doesn't seem to have been in active development since October 2010."

I know for a fact that Impressive hasn't been discontinued, and a new release is just around the corner. Its last release was on 2010-10-17, but its SVN repo was really busy these past months. Personally, I thought that it was quite a stretch to call Impressive "discontinued". By comparison, Firestarter was last released in 2005. If Impressive was tagged as discontinued for a 3-year absence, surely Firestarter deserves to be discontinued for an 8-year absence.

Either way, it seems to me that there is no clear AlternativeTo policy on what constitutes a discontinued app. Can this be fixed? (Or guidelines clarified?)

[Edited by landroni, December 22]

Yeah, we don't really have official guidelines for what determines whether an app is "discontinued" or not. Personally, I don't like to pass judgment unless I can get obvious developer confirmation that an app has been discontinued, though some of my fellow moderators have differing standards. This is probably something that should be addressed, but so far, I guess it just hasn't been a big enough problem.

Anyways, I've removed the "discontinued" notice for Impressive. I'm still reluctant to mark Firestarter as discontinued. Their documentation continues to be updated, and sourceforge says that the app was last updated on June 2013 (though I have no idea exactly what they updated). http://sourceforge.net/projects/firestarter/

Thanks for looking into this.

I think that the SF "Last Update: 2013-06-03" says something about the SF website (some content was updated, maybe), but I wouldn't put too much value on that specific date. I have been heading a different project on SF, and for the life of me I never understood why SF was updating that date as I knew I didn't do anything significant to the code or the site.