Transferring the Leadership of Open Source Projects?

Frabcus asks: "I founded an Open Source project TortoiseCVS, a Windows Explorer shell extension for using CVS, but now I'm looking to hand on project management to someone else. When I started out, I had an itch to scratch. We started using CVS at work and I didn't like the interface for WinCVS, so I made a better one. Now it's a year and a half later and TortoiseCVS does everything that I want it to, so I'd like to move on to other things and let someone else take it on. There have been over 20,000 downloads, so I have quite a large user base, but not many people are active in supplying patches. Do you guys have experience of handing on an Open Source project? How did you find someone who has similar goals that will fit in with the existing code?" The thing to do is to start asking around in development circles. The best starting place, of course, is among the existing user-base. For those of you who have transferred Open Source projects, how did you go about finding your successor?

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?

Comments

I don't agree with some of the comments here

[linuxrunner]

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.

Re:GAIM

[bjb]

I think it has more to do with the fact that GAIM is a project that people really want. Not to say that people don't want the CVS interface, but with the popularity of instant messaging these days, a good AIM-like client for multiple platforms has a definate market.

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.