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

rule number one

[sam@caveman.org]

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

Re:rule number one

[babbage]

I disagree. The ugly truth about open source is that, in spite of the grassroots image, every significant project has been primarily driven in a top down way. Think about the irony there. When you think closed source, you think Windows, Oracle, Photoshop, etc., all of which have big corporate names behind them, and thus their unseen legions of developers -- Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe. When you think open source you think Linux, Perl, Emacs, and most of them have the names of individuals associated with them -- Torvalds, Wall, Stallman.

This first guy said outright that a lot of people have downloaded his application but few have submitted patches back to it. That flatly contradicts your suggestion. And as for the second guy, he doesn't sound so different -- he still seems to want to run things, he just wants a break from the tedium of actually writing the code. Boo frickin hoo to him, I say -- if this Java game is his baby he shouldn't expect someone else to care about it as much as he did. It's much easier for me to sympathize with the CVS guy -- he's done what he set out to do, now he's willing to let others go where they will with it. If the project is to continue, this is what will have to happen: some other lead developer (or group of developers) will have to see something in the project that they want fleshed out, so it can become *their* itch to scratch, not someone elses. People don't tend to scratch other peoples' software itch unless they're being paid to do it, which brings us back towards the proprietary model.

What you say sounds nice in theory and adheres nicely to the party line, but the sad fact is that the mechanics of things don't let them work out that way. Only the biggest projects have anything looking like a team effort -- Perl6 comes to mind -- and even then they're being lead by a core group of people, so it isn't really an exception to the rule.

GAIM

[akiaki007]

That was a success in ownership hand down. Perhaps you should ask them how they did it.

When I have someone take over...

[nll8802]

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.

You know what we need?

[Anonymous Coward]

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..."

Does it really need improvement?

[Eugene O'Neil]

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.

hard

[stoopidguy]

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.

Come now, be honest

[sharkticon]

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.

The two submissions are vastly different,

[tony_gardner]

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?

Consider a BSD license

[alexhmit01]

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

Unmaintained Free Software

[uh1763]

Hi all.

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

• find out whether a project is unmaintained or not
  
• find a project they can work on
  
• announce that their own project is not maintained anymore and that they search a new maintainer for it
  
• gather some statistical data about why Free Software related projects become unmaintained, how long it takes to find a new maintainer (if at all), etc...
  

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.

Tortoise Rocks!

[nambit]

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 ;-)