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Ettiquette For Restarting Abandoned Open Source Projects?

Posted by Cliff on from the avoiding-toe-steppage dept.

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?"

9 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Fork you! by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Fork you! by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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."

      --
      Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
    2. Re:Fork you! by photon317 · · Score: 5, Insightful


      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.

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      11*43+456^2
    3. Re:Fork you! by PD · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  2. Re:Eric Raymond by photon317 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yes, he wrote a huge paper on related issues, all of which is quite accurate and good information. Link below brought to you by Karma Whores International:

    http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/h omesteading

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    11*43+456^2
  3. Been there - Stunnel by Brian+Hatch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Eric Raymond by hswerdfe · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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!

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    --meh--
  5. Um... me too? by dacarr · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'm gonna go on and concur with everybody on here, with an interesting note of trivia.

    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.
  6. Check unmaintained-free-software.org by tawaste · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have you checked it's not in http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/