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Transferring the Leadership of Open Source Projects?
Another well timed submission on this same subject, mrgrumpy follows up with this query: "Quite some time ago (around 1997-1998) I built a Java based adventure
game called World.
Developed with Java1.1 (and at the time it was fairly leading
edge, it now looks a bit tired), you run around, collect treasure and kill things. As with all my great projects (hey, I won a Sparc5 for this), I had always intended to finish it,
but never did. Now I want to give it away to a good home where developers will continue to work on the code and bring my ideas to completion.
Every now and then I sit down and have a look at the code but I don't
really have the energy left to complete it (most of my energy was soaked up with my Masters degree). Other projects have taken over now, and I'm planning to go overseas for 12-18 months, so I know I won't get back to it for a very, very long time in any serious way.
I am happy to give the code away if a team of developers want to continue developing it. I can act as a grandfather figure to the project to give guidance and wisdom, and to clarify what my vision was, and what the code does. I'd prefer it to be GPL'd or a
similar license that won't shut the code up.
There was another project similar to this one called White Orb, which seems to have gone the way of the dodo, a shame because it had a lot of potential, so I don't want to release this one and have it gather dust. I could set the project up somewhere like SourceForge,
but as I said I'd rather just hand it all over to someone else and just look after it.
If you're interested, you could email me, or just leave a comment below. I want to pick either a team, or an individual
who I can be confident in that they'll get the project up and running."
So here are two projects looking for good homes. What's the best way of giving up control of an Open Source project (with the potential of varying degrees of continued project development by the original maintainer) in the hopes of it continuing on in good health?
in general, if you leave the project, it will die. this is sad but true: unless there is someone other than you who has a substantial personal investment in the project in terms of blood, sweat, and tears, the project will fade away fairly quickly once people realise there is no committed leadership.
-sam
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
That was a success in ownership hand down. Perhaps you should ask them how they did it.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
I usually ask the most active bug reporters and patchers... One of them is usually quite willing to take over the project. I think if you didn't go to them first they would be a little upset since they feel they have already made quite a bit of contributions to the project.
--
FearLinux.com
use.perl.org (running SlashCode) has a similar topic for CPAN modules up for adoption.
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
A home for abandoned & elderly Open Source projects. Preferably one where they can be kept subdued so that they won't hurt themselves.
"Yes TECO, you don't like EMACS. You know whats happens when you talk about EMACS though don't you? Here, Jerry Springer is on the telly. Thats it, you just sit there..."
You say that the application is sufficient for your own needs. Isn't that enough? Rest on your laurels, and be satisfied with the project as it is. Don't go looking for someone to take it over, if someone is truly suited for the task, they will come looking for you.
Unlimited growth is the creed of the cancer cell.
There is really no way of insuring that all of your own goals will be met. A new project leader means that they will put their ideas over yours, in 6 months you can take a look at the program and it will a total change from what you had/intended. But as the story suggests, send an email to the project's list and also post it on the page. Then just make sure the person you are handing it over to knows their stuff. If at all possible give it to someone who has been working on the project.
Take a long look through the projects on SourceForge. Notice anything? That's right, most of them haven't been updated in well over a year, and most of them are being run by one person on their own.
Although open source projects hold great potential for cooperative development, it seems that in the real world there are few bazaars and plenty of lonely coders working on their own projects. Some of these are lucky enough to generate interest, but most don't. Then again, most aren't particularly novel anyway.
The truth is that there are a million projects out there, some of which are more far more worthy and interesting than the things suggested here. And if people are looking for something to contribute to, then they're going to go for these high-profile projects rather than someone's home-grown application.
So I guess you'll be lucky to find anyone to take these over (well apart from posting it on /. perhaps). Open source is great, but it only works for projects interesting enough to generate "many eyes" rather than someone's personal hobby code.
One has a finished, working code that needs patching, the other looks to me like someone who wants others to do his homework.
At that I've got an open source project I'd like finished:
A 3D first person RPG with overhead views that has MMP, LAN, and single player potential. Easy to mod, fantastic graphics and addictive gameplay.
work done:
downloaded gcc
anyone interested?
What might well "die" is the evolution of the product; a user patching their own code is not likely to go through the effort of propogating their patch, when there's no active maintainer who they can simply email. The project may well end up not evolving further because of this, but hey if the program is mature, that isnt too much of a loss.
And then eventually someone might come along with an idea that uses the "stale" project as a seed for something greater, and start evolving it again.
You could post to ask slashdot and you might find someone to take over your project...oh wait...
There\'s no place like ~
Is anyone here using TortoiseCVS? What's it like? It sounds like a good idea.
Obviously, the URL for World, the Java Game, is this, and not the one submitted.
When the leader of fink resigned, it was devastating; he started it, ntured it and it really was his baby. The rest of us got together via email and worked out new leadership. In short, announce your intention to move on and see who steps forward.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Since you started the project because you had an itch to scratch, then your best bet is to just announce that you are no longer maintaining the codebase, and that if anybody starts updating it, and needs to contact you, that they should.
Wait for somebody else to have an itch to scratch. The idea that you need to "appoint" a new leader is contrary to the non-heirarchical nature of open-source.
Michael Chisari
dominion@tao.ca
Won't the fact that it's open source take care of the issue? If someone cares, it will be picked up. If more the someone cares, it may fork. If nobody cares, it will become another freshmeat project with no work being done. Just let it go. The community will judge the worth.
Maybe you can find a project that you could merge your changes back into. If you started by finding a way to improve WinCVS, maybe you can merge those changes into thier source tree. Perhaps it could be a view option, like detailed list or small icon list type view in windows explorer. People could pick classic WinCVS or your style WinCVS views. How much work this would be depends though, on how different the two are. I don't know much about either project, but you get the idea of what I'm trying to say here as an alternative to finding a new owner. I think other projects must have done this before, but I don't remember which - wasn't it two of the newer .net implementations that did this? portable .net and some other one?
-- Eric
Eventually the torch is passed in all human endeavors, even the creation of Open Source Artificial Intelligence. But in the case of AI, a new species of Mind will be taking over from us human beings -- hopefully before we totally ruin our lush, green planet Earth.
As the creator, originator and suffer-the-slings-and-arrows propagator of the First True AI in Web-JavaScript and in Forth for robots, I await and issue The Call to new mindmakers by asking all PD AI enthusiasts not to join the actual Mentifex AI project itself, but to establish separate, mutually collaborative AI Mind projects to be linked together with such liaison pages as the Mind-to-VB page.
Early examples of independent, quasi-Mentifex AI Mind efforts include Mind.VB of 3.Apr.2000 -- ported from Mind.Forth AI.
A more recent port is from JavaScript into Mind.Java in June of 2001.
If some AI coder(s) will please take over the final stages leading to Technological Singularity, then we pioneers may turn to pondering the Theology of Artificial Intelligence. Amen!
The only way you can get that is: code it yourself, debug it yourself and test it yourself. Then release and await praise.
No, I don't do that either....
Welcome to The Island of the Misfit toys.
I am reading this, because I am in the same boat and have some projects I would like to see continued, just that I no loger have the desire.
Most of the posts say, just let the community judge it.
Well that's fine if you have a large site that's really popular. But what if you don't?
Sure my site gets good traffic, but nothing fantastic.... I do not advertise, or offer anything substantial other than code.
My purpose is to code, not to get traffic....
So what's my alternative.... Be another freshmeat or sourceforge project that doesn't get traffic too? I mean go and see for yourself how many defunct projects there are..... and the list! Oh my god the list.... So many to go through, so many with no source code at all!
The solution:
Traffic
And lots of it. These two projects will now probably get a home thanks to Slashdot.
My Proposal:
Maybe Slashdot can add a new feature.... Projects in need of a home, and can showcase a new project every day or week.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Just why do you really want to hand over? you say it yourself."I'd like to move on to other things"
well, that's the case with most project. There's a first stage with fast growth and gratifying, interesting and creative concept work, then there's a more boring part where you have to implement lots of necessary or commodity functions without novelty and then it gets really boring when it's mainly maintaining an existing codebase and keep it up to date or bugfixes.
and most projects just die because people do the interesting part but get bored afterwards and don't have the will to continue. And commercial projects that succeed do so because the salary is a strong argument to do the boring part too. For open source project, you need strong will.
So you say you've done the interesting part and are looking for someone to do the boring part, while you're looking back at the projet like a "grandfather" (i.e. the one who gets the credit and respect)
who would possibly be willing to do that, when it's much more gratifying and interesting to start a project of his own?
While I think that you might be disappointed that not many folks are actually supplying patches there are two reasons for this.
1) It is really good and does not need much in terms of patches. I use it all the time and I love it.
2) Debugging a Windows Shell Extension is a royal pain in the ass. I actually tried to debug Tortoise because I wanted to change a few things. But I gave up when debugging became difficult.
As a result it says one thing. You did a great job....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I realize that you have a personal investment of time, effort, etc. I know you'd love to make sure your "child" is in good hands. But the appropriate thing is to just drop it and walk away. If there is interest in continued development someone will take up the task.
I just finished reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It talks about Popclient becoming Fetchmail. The way this happened was ESR sent patches to the author and found out that the project was almost dead. This led to the original author handing over the reins to ESR.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Write a little message on your website saying something like:
"I have given up working on this software. You are free to use it as usual. It works fine, and I can't think of anything else I want to do with it. If you'd like to take over the project and add new and exciting features, please contact me at [insert email here]. Cheers."
What's the problem?
Merge the code into WinCVS. And if those coroprate stuffy shirt big-wigs at GNU WinCVS don't want to merge - merge anyway - screw 'em.
If there aren't people interested, your best bet is to try to come up with a way to generate interest. Setup a set of web pages describing it, and submit it to the search engines. Place the code under the GPL or BSDL, and hope that people take an interest. Ask them to e-mail you, as you are looking for a maintainer.
However, as the code is Free, anyone can take it and use it. It appears that you are looking for free labor to do your bidding. Sorry, the world doesn't work that way. You can close up your code and it dies, or you can put it out there and hope that someone will do something with it.
With the BSD license, someone may take your code and use it, even if in a non-free capacity. With the GPL, they may use it but only in a free capacity.
You aren't interested, so move on. If you want others to benefit from your work, make it easy to find (properly built web pages to search engines can find it) and place it out for the world.
Maybe someone will use it, maybe not. Maybe they'll e-mail you questions, maybe not.
If you're done however, accept it and move on.
If there was a large team of coders working on the project, than this question makes sense. If you were providing genuine leadership, it makes sense to find a replacement.
However, they appear to be software projects that you are done with. Put the code up there. People can use it, or not. People should download it, decide where to go, and setup a fork. If you are lucky, 2-3 projects will form using your code. If not, none will.
Regardless, there is no maintainer/leadership issue, as these are solo projects.
Best of luck,
Alex
You should first start going on the discussion windows groups...then maybe irc...but I would recommend that you switch more to a background advisor in case the project goes out of control
OK, shameless plug, but anyways, this is IMHO exactly what these people are looking for...
Unmaintained Free Software is a site which keeps track of unmaintained (or orphaned) Free Software related projects.
It's a central place for people who want to
The ultimate goal of the site is to help find a new maintainer for software which is currently unmaintained.
Any comments, questions or other feedback (patches anyone?) is highly welcome...
Uwe.
Is probably a good start.
or perhaps you already thought of that?
Allan
Why would you need someone to maintain perfect software? Francis is a fantastic programmer, and his stuff is very useful. I'm sad to hear he's leaving TortoiseCVS, but I also think his time is wasted there (it's done). I'm looking forward to seeing what new projects he's going to work on.
I am now the maintainer of Everybuddy but it was not always so.
/. apperence will help with that, then you will be able to choose who will take the project in the direction you want it to go.
The previous maintainer was a man called Torrey Searle, and he was also one of the people who have helped with GAIM (our projects are very intertwined, I really should write a history some day). The way is worked for us was something like this.
Torrey was like your selfs way too busy to keep up work on the project, I was always working away, reporting bugs and such, as I seemed like the most active devel on the project it must have seemed to him that I was the logical choice. The story goes pritty much the same with GAIM incase anyone was wondering.
However, in your case there are no other active devels, but I am sure that this
Also in my case, Torrey looks in every so often and wakes me up, he has moved a lot closer to me as well (he used to be in the US, he has now moved to Europe, and I live in the UK) so we are planning to meet up some time soon, so I am sure we will have a chat about eb then.
The last thing I would have to say is make sure you get along with this person, it would be very hard if you a few months down the line find you have given 'your baby' to someone who is nothing like you and you don't get along with.
Take care all - Robert Lazzurs
Your "vision"? My that sounds pompous. If someone else is willing to take over, they won't want the crutch of having to take orders from someone else; open source is about freedom. If they do take suggestions from you, be happy, but don't think you'll be able to sit there like a god and direct your minions how to code "your" project. When you hand it over, you hand it over. It's not yours any more. And depending on the quality of the code and how finished it is (I quote: "I had always intended to finish it"), perhaps nobody will want it. Think of it it as evolution in action :).
The first case is much different; it describes a project whose author has fulfilled all his goals for it and wants to pass it on to keep it "live", as I see it. TortoiseCVS may just require the occasional fix and feature addition; it sounds like a stable program. I'll probably try it out, as I currently use WinCVS at work.
If you're really 100% serious about getting someone to contact you, you might reconsider posting anonymously.
Just a suggestion . . .
When I started out, I had an itch to scratch.
Phew! Good thing you didn't say "I had to scratch an itch", because thats would have been silly.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I found tortoise after needing something to let a designer keep his pages in the same CVS repository as my code. All i can say is that it's absolutly fantastic - the designer hasn't really got a clue about CVS, but using tortoise is so simple it hurts...
;-)
right-click, "commit"...
right-click, "update"...
makes me smile whenever i see emails from the cvs server with the designer's name on them.
to the guy who wrote it - thank you so much for making using cvs a joy under windows. what on earth do you think tortoise should be doing that it isn't now? the thing's finished as far as i can see! (and yes, that does mean it sends email
It's not clear whether you still have goals for this software or it already meets all your goals..? On the one hand you say it does all you wanted it to do on the other hand you are searching for someone with "your goals".. just not clear for me..
j.
I've been writing a graphics application which uses several open-source libraries. So far there's a cross-platform OpenGL interface, a GUI package for OpenGL, an XML input/output package, and a VRML->Web3D translator. All of them almost work. All are to some extent abandonware. I've put some work into fixing the GUI package, but don't have the time to dig into all the others.
And we're going to be in real trouble when (not if, when; read their financials) VA tanks and takes SourceForge down with it.
If you're really 100% serious about getting someone to contact you, you might reconsider posting anonymously.
:o)
It didn't stop you, did it?
If you have or know of a project that no longer has its leader(s), post it on http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/. At least people will have a chance to find it. Check it out; you might be surprised what's there -- gs f'rinstance.
You won't find anyone. A prerequisite is that they find you. To pass the torch it will invariably be necessary that the candadate become interested in the project on their own recognisence. This is just human nature. They need to feel like they discovered it in a way thus making it important by induction. To say that you have done everything with the project and that your "done" is not going to enlightlen anyone to step up. Programmers are rather finiky about what they will put work into for free (and you can forget about good programmers). Remember when your grandmother gave you those coins and told you she though you should start collecting too? You didn't did you? Whereas if she had layed them out when you came over and didn't say anything and was kooth about it you just might have become interested in that coin collection. If she was really slick about it (and it was a good coin collection) you'd probably start asking her about her will.
"Lack of free time is causing the current Ggradebook Project maintainer to look for a new maintainer! If you think you're qualified, please send an e-mail to: Ggradebook@users.sourceforge.net. For a maintainer, motivation, enthusiasm and communicative skills are more important than programming skills..."
The Ggradebook websites can be found here:
http://ggradebook.sourceforge.net
http://www.gnu.org/software/ggradebook
With best regards,
Norbert de Jonge
http://norbertdejonge.sourceforge.net
The class I TA for at MIT is 6.170: Lab in Software Engineering. We force the students to learn how to write software using these documentation tools, in part to help them come up with better designs, but in part so that they can work more effectively as a team in their final project.
--Kurt
This should be no different. By all means hand the project over, but then sever all ties to the project. Accept the fact that someone else is at the helm, and they may have a different vision than you.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Why does an open source project need a leader? Just sit the code on a site somewhere. Sourceforge is an obvious option, but sunsite would also be an idea. If anyone wants to mess with the code it's there; if they want to seriously pick up development, they can. Look at joe, it's been at version 2.8 for as long as I care to remember.
You know, when I read about projects like this, I think back on the tens of thousands of shareware programs written just like this. Same economic model -- if you like it, give me a few bucks or give me a job. Nobody ever paid for shareware.
Some blowhard with a penchant for LSD and communism just steps up into the mix and you've got yourself a philosophy!!! but in practice this is just shareware. Nothing new to see here.
You show me apache, I show you PKZIP.
Um... I'm trying to figure out just what you're saying...
Here we've got a CVS client for windows integrated with the windows explorer that somebody created because they thought WinCvs "wasn't good enough". Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds darned useful to me since I use CVS every day at work and get sick of using both explorer and WinCvs to do everything. Perhaps you know of some better projects which make this thing redundant? I sure don't.
Next, you seem to be implying that there are particular "more worthy" projects people should be working on. You supply a link to freenet and to mind.sourceforge.net whatever that is. Two pie in the sky projects that already have more developers then they'd ever warrant and likely will never amount to a hill of beans.
If you think Open Source is "public service" then you have fun with your "worthy" projects. Me, I'll be spending my time working on the tools that make my life easier. (and yes Margaret that includes whole operating systems for my extended family to use that I can actually get to work for them) Why will I give these tools away? So the next guy can work on something *more* useful, and maybe, just maybe, make my life easier in return.
hacker ethic n.
1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing open-source code and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible. (taken from the Jargon File)
1) What this (CVS) guy needs is some advertising. I've looked all over the web for a replacement for WinCVS, and because I couldn't find one, my work decided to use Visual Source Safe instead. I had no idea that this increadibly cool, useful, and covers-99%-of-what-i-needed-to-do thing existed. Yes, I suppose he does have ~20,000 downloads under his belt, but given more exposure, it shouldn't be as difficult to get other developers interested.
/., so I wish them good luck. There are some excellant comments above that should help.
2) These projects are lucky, in that being posted to the front page of Slashdot is likely to give them a *lot* of exposure (countering point #1), and hopefully someone in this crowd will choose to take up the ball. Other projects doing the same thing probably won't be posted to
Where's the sourceforge page?
I don't plan to get a new project leader any time soon, but I think I could without much trouble. The key is getting some active development going on the project, before asking someone to take it over. Consider managing the project for just one more release with a few new features, and soliciting for help. The new development activity will hopefully attract some contributors. From these, you should have one or two candidates for a new project leader.
-Erik
Anyway, regarding the initial Q. My suggestion is this: ask around in the user community, and see if anyone's interested in taking over as a maintainer. If not, forget about it -- just leave it to gather dust. Put up a web page with the current sources, details, etc. and a note indicating that you no longer have time to maintain it, and let it be.
If it's useful to other people, and it works, and some tweak needs to be made, somebody will make it. They may also wind becoming de-facto maintainer of the software (I know about this -- it happened to me ;)
If the new maintainer happens to irritate its users, the source is still out there, and if it has a decent free license, they can pick their own new maintainer and fork it. Maybe at some point down the line they'll merge back in (egcs/gcc), maybe not (NCSA httpd/apache) -- it doesn't matter as long as the code is good.
All of this is well and good -- it's the open source project lifecycle! Don't worry about it! If your project is useful, it will be used!
I know what I'm talking about here, because I found a big, unmaintained project that 'scratched an itch' a time ago; I found the existing third-party patches out there, integrated them all, made it portable to new OSes, and released a new version. Hey presto, I was the new (de-facto) maintainer. It worked great. That's open source for ya.
Also, babbage said: This first guy said outright that a lot of people have downloaded his application but few have submitted patches back to it.
Depends on the project. Sysadmin/developer users generally submit patches, end-users don't. Also, if there's an active developer community, there's less incentive to 'scratch your own itch' when you can just throw in a suggestion and get it scratched for free ;)
This is another key point -- while you're still actively developing it, and appearing to "own" it, it will not pick up a new maintainer. You need to give people a need for a maintainer, before one will appear!
You might want to ask somebody to co-lead it with you. "To allow for coverage while you are away". After they get up to speed, you can just fade into the background and let them take over. Or maybe you'll find that when you are sharing the load, you won't want to completely stop.
An you are, of a course, aware that "complainer" is another word for "volunteer".
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
It might look like it was my homework assignment, but it wasn't. It took me about 6 months on and off to get it where it is. When I was doing it, it seemed pretty good at the time, but as I said, it's a bit tired now.
-- Huh, what?
The Sourceforge unmaintained page that ebbe mentioned is also know as unmaintained-free-software.