Orphanages For Abandoned Free Software?

flea asks: "I recently went on a fishing expedition for a command-line, GPL'd document encoder/decoder for the Palm's popular DOC format. Using Google, I found lots of references to the Palm-OS-HOWTO, and a smattering of other sites, each of which refer to one of about 5 e-mail addresses for the author of the program, and a single Web site. All of the e-mail bounced back to me, and the URL is invalid. I don't have an FTP server to host the project from, and don't consider myself a very benevolent dictator, so I'd like to find a home for the source. I know there's a mechanism in place for people who want to adopt abandoned projects, but what about those of us who simply want to set the basket on the doorstep in hopes that someone competent will take it under their wing (forgive the metaphor-mixing)? If nothing else, an ftp site that can be indexed by Google so that people can FIND the source for such projects would be better than the current state of affairs."

Comments

Orphanages

[www.sorehands.com]

If you don't have a place for abandoned software to go, it will live on the streets and steal.

This is how Polarbar Mailer came to be. Polarbar is a all java mailer that came from JStreet Mailer.

But generally, when a company goes under, the creditors think that the code is worth money. By the time they realize it's not, they can't find it anymore and everyone is gone.

some urls:

[eMBee]

UFO -- keeping track of unmaintained Free Software projects
DOOSS -- Database of Orphaned Open Source Software
orphansource.org -- The home for orphaned source code, programs, and software projects.
UFO -- Unmaintained Free software and Open source projects.
Trioxin -- A project to keep track of the status of Free Software projects.

greetings, eMBee.
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Re:some urls:

[eMBee]

hmm, i forgot to give credit
if you look here you'll notice that i just pasted the links from there. thanks to Uwe Hermann for collecting them,
oh and the title to the top link should be "Unmaintained Free Software" and not UFO

(so much for proofreading)

greetings, eMBee.
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SourceForge, Server51

[Rob Kaper]

and Server 51 (or is that officially dead now?) are great places to host the project.

Yes, you would have to put some effort into maintaining at least that infrastructure, but you could build a simple page where you ask for someone else to really take over the project.

Just because you would be hosting it, doesn't mean you are leading the project. As soon as a real, qualified leader stands up, you can simply turn over your small FTP/WWW site maintainance and everyone's happy.

Re:SourceForge, Server51

[Rob Kaper]

That should've said SourceForge and Server51... sorry!

Re:are you looking for MakeDoc?

[A Big Gnu Thrush]

ZDOC never did much for me as far as Palm Doc readers goes. Though it has the worst name of any software ever released, CSpotRun is a high quality Doc reader that has been released under the GPL.

Great Browser Archive

[Cy Guy]

This was posted by another /. reader in regards to the Classic Browsers Given New Life thread


The other way of doing this of course, is simply to download and install the appropriate browser from the evolt.org browser archive at http://browsers.evolt.org/.