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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?
Not really. Microsoft software (why do you always pick this enterprise) is made aiming *MONETARY RETURN*, not quality. If they can make crap and sell it for a good price, that's what they are going to do.
And I think it is YOU who should look at the facts before posting. Take a look at the project page in SourceForge: 3 administrators and 19 developers - this is a good quantity of people, don't you agree? Are you sure that he wasn't helped by a lot of people?
The catch twenty-two of project maintenance is that anybody who has the experience knows how much effort it requires and will be reluctant to volunteer, so the people who will actually step forward are those who are too inexperienced to know better.
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?
Definitely. What I would do is announce on all your development/announcement mailing lists that you are ending your reign as maintainer and happy to hand over the project to someone else. Also put a blurb about this on your project website right on the front page. Make sure all source code is available--toss in a README file with all your final thoughts and things you were thinking of doing and whatever else. Make sure you copyright all the code and place it under whatever license is important to you. This involves adding license text to the top of every file in the project as well as adding a LICENSE file with the download.
Then just move on with your life. If someone finds your project and has an itch they need to scratch, they'll contact you about taking over or whatever.
That's what happened with Lyntin--Lyn stopped development and a year later I discovered the project and we chatted and I took over and moved it to sourceforge and so on so forth.
On the flip side, you can always take a super passive role on your project. If it does everything you want it to do, then it's "done" and you can just hang out and deal with patches if people send them in.
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
Sure, there's other IM clients and protocols out there, but AOL's IM is certainly the king (from what I see). From past experience with some of these open source clients (read: haven't touched 'em in several months), I found that GAIM was probably several (if not more) steps ahead of the competition.
I think in the end it really comes down to how much of a demand among "geeks" the program has. With the CVS extension mentioned, it certainly is a good tool to have, but it is a Windows product; GAIM is more Linux/UNIX which tends to draw a larger geek crowd. If you were to compare Windows to UNIX users, you would find considerably more people with serious programming skill on the UNIX side. These are the people who would pick up and develop these projects.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
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.
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
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