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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?"
Yah, but keep in mind that he wants to keep the old project name and assume control of development. I think there is a distinction between that and a fork; a big one. "Project foo is now being actively maintained by me" requires a lot more tying of loose ends than "Project foo is derived from the abandoned bar, and is picking up where it left off."
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I have been in almost exactly the same position you find yourself. Mike Trojnara, who was (and again is) the developer of Stunnel fell off the face of the Internet for a while back in 2000, and there were several problems that I discovered in the code during his absense. The machine running it was no longer under his control, and eventually dissapeared alltogether, so I took all my archives and started creating new versions. To make it obvious I'd taken over, aside from being blatant about it on the mailing list (which was still working) I labeled my versions differently - 3.8p1 instead of 3.9, for example. Eventually Mike found his way back onto the net, and I promptly and happily handed the developer's sword back to him. His next version was build directly from my latest version (though he later removed the 'goto' I put in there just because I could.)
I had always planned on giving it back to him if he wanted it (I wasn't comfortable developing crypto code here in the US at the time - my rights were still very vaguely defined at the time) so in my experience it went off without a hitch, and there was no fork, just a smooth transition from one to the other.
If you want to continue maintaining it, and are releasing it under the GPL (which I assume you must), there's no reason the original author can't fork off yours or maintain his older branch separately.
I'd say make every effort to reach the original author, and if you don't get anywhere, start maintaining it. You have every legal right, and even the moral right when Open Source code stagnates.
I once checked with the Free Software Foundation on whether they knew anything about the OS/2 port of EMACS (last check had it at 19.3.x or something really old). As they were unable to contact anybody on that, I was told that I was welcome to do what I would with it, be it build the original code or just let it fester.
That's the really cool thing about GNU - a side effect is that if somebody stops the show for some reason and abandons the project (in this case...well, OS/2, you do the math), you are welcome to pick up whatever pieces were left and run with the torch. Sourceforge even seems to allow for that, with the resources already there.
This sig no verb.
wondering if he's talking about one of my abandoned software packages?
I have had this happen with code I wrote. Basically I have stopped developing the code. Hey it works it does what I want it to do and I am happy with it and so are others. However there are a few that want more out of it so they send me an email and ask me if they can modify it or do whatever to it. I say yes, go ahead, just call it something different please. It works. To me it is basiclly 'open source coding courtesy'. Just tell the project owner that you want to make changes to the code or that you have made changes. The most you can do is send them an email and hope they reply. Often they will say have at it.
Only 'flamers' flame!