Adopt-a-Free-Software-Project Program Launched

bero-rh writes: "We have just launched the UFO (Unmaintained Free software Open source) project -- an attempt to fix one of the very few problems with open source: People who used to maintain a package and can't do it anymore can leave it to the project where at least basic maintenance work is done. We'll also try to find a new real maintainer for the packages."

Comments

One of the "few" problems with open source...

[Zagadka]

People who used to maintain a package and can't do it anymore...

It would be interesting to find out why this happens. My guess is that it's one of the following:

1. health reasons
2. lack of interest in the project
3. "they don't have the time"

My guess is that for most open source projects that go into an unmaintained state, #3 is by far the most common reason. Of course, this is most likely a euphemism for "I have a job now, and I have to concentrate my efforts on something that actually pays the rent".

Instead of finding alternative maintainers, I think it would be immensely useful if the open source community would try to solve the real problem: how do developers of open source software get paid?

Now, I know a lot of people are going to go into flame mode, but try to think rationally about what I'm saying. If open source developers were actually paid for their work, they would be able to spend more of their time working on open source. They wouldn't need to get day jobs writing closed source proprietary software, but instead become full-time open source developers. And who really deserves to get paid anyways? The guys who created the software in the first place, or the guys who took their software, and put it in a pretty box?

I don't know how this could be implemented though. To be considered open source, developers have to release their code in such a way that others are just as able to make a profit off of it as the developer. What ends up happening is that distributors, who spend little or no effort actually developing code comparitively, end up making all of the income, while the actual software developers make none. Hence, they need to get day jobs, hence less time to work on open source, hence open source projects that are lower quality than they could be, and many projects falling by the wayside.

If open source developers were paid a competetive salary for producing open source software there would not only be "more eyeballs" actively looking at the code, but those people would actually be spending a lot more time working on open source, rather than using up their energy working on closed software.

So is there a way developers can make money of the open source they produce? Every time I've asked people about this they always bring up the old "you can make money off support argument". Sorry, that doen't work. I'm not a tech support guy. I'm a developer, I want to write software. I'd like to write open source software (and I do, when I have the time). I can't afford to do it full-time though. Others mention contract work. Contract work generally produces software that isn't particularly useful as open source because it's often "implement this weird thing that only we would ever find a use for" type of stuff.

Utopia for me would be if I could work on various OSS projects like GIMP, GNOME, sawmill, VIM, and my own projects, and make a decent salary (ie: competetive with closed source developers, not a waiter's salary). Ideally, the system would work in such a way that the more useful my contributions to the community, the more I'd make. This is the real world though, and here the open source community seems to feel that free beer is necessary for free speech...

Adopt-a-Coder

[Signal 11]

I'd like to also announce the adopt-a-coder program. After working long hours debugging why their program segfaults when given an input of 64910 characters long, but only if it doesn't contain the letter a and it's an even-numbered day, some programmers understandably.. lose it.

You see, this is where the adopt-a-program comes in.. after these poor souls go mad, somebody else needs to work on the code.. and then they go mad, and so on. Eventually the program will be put into a usable state, but there's an excess number of insane programmers out there.

Here's what I suggest: Adopt-a-Coder. For $10 per day, you can help feed an insane coder. All you need is a 12 pack of cola and cold pizza and/or ramen noodles. Provide him/her with a dedicated DSL line, and rehabilitate him. It's a hard job, but it's also rewarding. You see, most people don't know that programming has little to do with computers, and more to do with large quantities of caffeine and memory loss. Unfortunately, the fallout from this is very serious.

PLEASE, help an insane coder. It's the least you can do.

i have a wierd idea here.

[mcc]

A piece of software losing its maintainer is a vague problem for the users of open source software, but in the closed source world losing the maintainer is a really rather dangerous problem which will slowly get worse and worse as time passes from the time the maintainer goes away. If your hardware changes and the program doesn't like it, or you need a bug fixed, too bad, because that code is gone and there's no way to fix it.

So I was just sitting here, looking at UFO, thinking about all the closed-source software that winds up getting abandoned by their parent companies, and i'm starting to wonder: what if UFO could get companies to give them the source to dead products instead of just letting the products die?

Of course, there's no reason for a company to do that; they'd get nothing out of it. So why not make it so they do get something?
Make the UFO part of the FSF. Since the FSF is a registered nonprofit organisation, UFO will thus become nonprofit too. Meaning any "donations" by corporations to UFO would be tax-deductable.
Is there any reason that wouldn't work? I don't know what defines "charity" legally but seems to me it would be pretty hard to claim that releasing software to UFO as open source anything other than helping the public good.
Think about it.

(P.S. If the people who made UFO are reading this.. this is TOTALLY irrelivent, and i realize the site isn't supposed to look that polished, but do do some slight tuning on that huge table in the project list. Adding a couple td bgcolor attributes to distinguish between a cell with a project name, a cell with project data, and an empty cell between projects would only take a minute or so, and it would help readability a _lot_. :) Your project looks very promising, good luck)

Re:Problems?

[bero-rh]

Since I created the project, I guess it's up to me to answer this...

• This one is more or less answered in the FAQ. Temporary maintainers will just have to work together. Real maintainers are supposed to tell the temporary maintainers where they want to take the package, and show at least a patch to show they can do something.
  
  Aside from that, first come first serve - once a package has found a new maintainer, it'll be removed from UFO (we can continue hosting it though).
• I haven't really thought about this, but I'd think someone who has maintained a program before will always have something to offer (experience, for instance). I guess it'll be a bit dependent on the particular package.
• This depends pretty much on the license - unless it's not open source, we don't intend to change licensing.
  
  The BSD license in general permits closed-source forks, the GPL doesn't (and licenses can't be changed without the consent of all contributors)

I'd welcome feedback on these and other issues very much - if you have any thoughts on this, let me know (either here or at bero@redhat.com)