Two Years of Unmaintained Free Software

Uwe Hermann writes: "Pretty exactly two years ago I started to work on the Unmaintained Free Software site. The site has come a long way since then, so here's a small coverage of the new features, the projects which have been added, those which already have found a new maintainer, and some more or less interesting statistics." This is a great project, the kind of thing that's not glamorous, just useful, interesting and needed. Uwe's report is below. (And Oh Yes, there are plenty of unclaimed projects for interested maintainers to adopt.) This also seems a nice time to point out that you could be reading this story from the Developers section slashbox, which you can turn on by adjusting your preferences.

1) What is Unmaintained Free Software?

Unmaintained Free Software is a database of orphaned or unmaintained Free Software related projects, i.e. projects that aren't developed any longer and have no maintainer.

A project is considered unmaintained, if

• the author says so on the project's homepage or on a mailing list etc.
• there hasn't been any activity (releases, CVS, mailing lists, homepage, etc.) for a long time. In that case, someone (read: me) emails the author and asks about the status of the project. If I don't get an answer within two weeks, I usually add the project to the site.

For more information about the site, please read the About page...

2) History

I wrote the very first version of the site in late 1999. At that time the project was called Unmaintained Linux and consisted of nothing more than a few static HTML pages. In April 2000 I rewrote the whole thing using PHP for the code and MySQL as the database backend and called it Unmaintained Free Software. There have been quite a few changes since then, read below.

3) Features

Some features which I have added since version 0.1 include:

• A (quite simple) search box.
• A Show-A-Random-Unmaintained-Project box.
• "Slashboxes" for Freshmeat, Newsforge and - you guessed it - Slashdot.
• The news (new projects, updated projects) are also available as an RSS feed for automated processing. You can also get the whole database dump , if you like.
• Lots of statistics are available, e.g. Top 10 licenses, Top 10 programming languages, Top 10 reasons why projects become unmaintained, Top 10 search query strings, etc. etc. Read the Statistics Page for details.
• Lots more. Read the ChangeLog .

Oh yes, did I mention that the code behind the site is GPL'd? No? Oh well, stupid me ...

4) Statistics

I already mentioned the Statistics Page . Here's a small overview of where we stand today ...

As I am writing this, there are 133 projects listed as unmaintained on the site. Among the still unmaintained projects are lots of small or unknown projects, but there's also a lot of quite "high-profile" projects which are unmaintained, e.g. GLchess , Golgotha (Remember? It's that RTS game started by crack.com), GTKsee , gv and finally (sadly) icewm .

Some of those projects which have already found a new maintainer include fakebo , Jump'n'Bump , TortoiseCVS and UML Sculptor . All in all, 30 projects have found a new maintainer already, the rest is still waiting for some talented coder to adopt them (hint, hint) ...

5) Call for help

I want YOU for Unmaintained Free Software!

There's lots of possibilities how you can contribute:

• Spot unmaintained projects and add them to Unmaintained Free Software.
• Even more important: Adopt unmaintained projects and continue their development!
• Send suggestions, report broken links, file bug-reports, fix bugs, send patches for the code etc. etc.

6) The End

So that's the end of my small article. Hope you liked it.

If you have questions about Unmaintained Free Software, or would like to contribute some time to the project, comments are welcome.

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