Ettiquette For Restarting Abandoned Open Source Projects?

nicsterrr asks: "What does one do when a promising open source project stops dead with no word from the developer(s)? I have been considering contributing to a certain sorceforge hosted project over the past few months, but unfortunately all development seems to have stopped and the main developer has vanished (from the internet at least). I understand that the GPL states that GPL source code can be used in derived work if the licence is unchanged, but I am hesitant just to 'hijack' the work done by (it seems) just one person, without first having an understanding of what his thoughts are first. In addition, there are almost no supporting comments in the code, and no separate developer documentation. What would you do in this situation if you were interested in furthering the undocumented, unfinished, and currently abandoned work (which at first glance seems to have potential) of someone else, and your attempts to contact them have been in vain?"

Comments

Fork you!

[TheSHAD0W]

What you're essentially doing is creating a development fork, with the original "tine" not being developed.

I suppose you should take some time and try and contact the original developers, and see if you can get an official go-ahead. But if you can't, go right ahead.

In the worst case, if the original maintainers come back and cause such a stink about your taking over the project, they can take what you produced and merge or develop their own fork.

Re:Fork you!

[photon317]

Of course, when you think about it, there's really not much reason to go about it that way. If what you intend to do is take over a seemingly-abandoned project, it's more politically correct to start a new project "based on", and essentially you've got a new fork and the old code-base stays stale. On your project page put some big shiny info and links to the old project and state that it seems to be derelict and you're trying to replace it and keep yours up to date or whatever.

Eventually Google pageranking will start bringing you up on searches for their project anways as you supplant them in relevance - and most importantly if/when they come back to life they won't feel violated like they would if you had taken over the main branch of the product, original name and all, and named yourself head honcho.

Re:Fork you!

[PD]

If the original maintainers come back and raise a stink you can tell them to screw off. It's not polite to give people permission to take the source and fork it, and then to complain when people do just that.

Just do it.

[LinuxLuddite]

Chances are the original author is no longer interested in the code, and may not want to hear about it anymore. Either that, or they've lost their Internet connectivity, moved on with their lives, or maybe even died. In all these case, I don't think they'll give a rat's ass if you take over their code and clean it up. And if they do, well, you can ask them to help you maintain your forked version :-) Leaving a project abandoned because somebody might not want you to work on it is wasteful, and goes against the whole Open-Source philosophy.

Not taking an abandoned Open Source project...

[inerte]

is like leaving a question without answer.

If they didn't want you to..

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't be GPL'd. That's what the license is there for. Use it.

Fork It.

[standsolid]

If the code is promising and the developer is gone, maybe it'd be easier to Fork the project into "MyProject2 - MyProject reborn" than to try to "hijack" the project off sourceforge. I'd definitely would fork off into my own development. I know what you mean by you wnat the thoughts of the main developer who started it. He could give you insight into what you should do from where he left off, or he might become excited about the project and ides you would have. Until he talks to you Fork it.

was it abandoned...

[zogger]

Was it really abandoned or did the guy have something happen to him in meatworld? I mean it could be anything, got locked up, got sick, moved to ubangiland, anything. With that said, here's one solution, you can fork it immediately,get to work on it,and if/when the original guy shows back up,contact him and either agree to rejoin efforts-or not.

It doesn't matter

[noz]

It is within your right under tha authors' chosen license that you may modify the source and make it publically available (which it must be :)).

I personally think it's great you're concerned with etiquette, but the author is uncontactable. If he contacts you in the future with concerns about your work, it appears you already have the manners to listen to him, at any time.

Good luck. :)

Re:Eric Raymond

[hswerdfe]

From your article:

The third way to acquire ownership of a project is to observe that it needs work and the owner has disappeared or lost interest. If you want to do this, it is your responsibility to make the effort to find the owner. If you don't succeed, then you may announce in a relevant place (such as a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to the application area) that the project appears to be orphaned, and that you are considering taking responsibility for it.

/. would have been a good start. to bad he didn't state the name of the project. I am willing to bet someone who reads, would know the maintainer.

silly silly people

post a link to the actual dead project!

As an "abandoner"...

[coyote-san]

As an "abandoner," I don't care if you fork a dead project (or a live one) as long as you make a reasonable effort to let me know and use a sufficiently distinct name to avoid confusion.

N.B., you don't HAVE to contact me, but it's a nice courtesy because I might be able to hook you up with others doing similar work, or I might have something in the pipeline very similar to what you want to do but which I don't yet consider publishable.

It sounds like you did everything you could, so fork the project and give it a new name and don't worry about it. For a year or so, you'll want to mention the fork from the old project, but just in case it revives or there are other forks in progress - it makes it much easier to coordinate efforts in the future.

BTW, reasons I've dropped off the net include travel, busy with work, busy with life, busy with skills development, etc. I've occasionally dropped it because I realized that there was a much cleaner way of solving the problem, but sometimes the approach is so different that I create a new project instead of having an abrupt transition in the old one. Hell, I've even abandoned a project because it depended on another group for some critical libraries, but their attitude made it too time consuming to use their library but impossible to work around them. (Yeah, I'm talking to you Debian apt developers. Apt is great, but it's not a full CMS system.)