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Ask Slashdot: Attracting Developers To Abandonware?

Posted by Soulskill on from the use-bacon dept.

phlawed writes "I've been a Linux user since the previous millennium. I came from OS/2, which I really liked. I quickly felt at home with icewm, using a suitably tweaked config to give me something resembling Presentation Manager. I may have commented on that before. Today, I find myself in a position where my preferred 'environment' is eroding. The only force keeping icewm rolling these days is the distribution package maintainers. I can't code in any meaningful way, nor do I aspire to. I could easily pay for a supported version of icewm, but I can't personally pay someone enough to keep it alive. I'd love it if someone took a personal interest in the code, to ensure that it remains up to date, or to make it run on Wayland or whatever. I want someone to own the code, be proud of it. Is there a general solution for this situation? How do I go about drumming up interest for an old project?"

7 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. There is a way by Rinisari · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I could easily pay for a supported version of icewm, but I can't personally pay someone enough to keep it alive.

    Sure you can. Find someone to work on it and get them to sign up for Gittip, while you do the same. You can "tip" them a few cents to several bucks per week for their efforts and they can get paid by you and other supporters.

    --
    Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
  2. Android is not Linux ... by perpenso · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While on the topic about fragmentation... Android is another type of linux.

    No, its not. End users and nearly all **developers** don't see it. The Linux kernel could probably be swapped out with a BSD kernel and few would notice. Even for those using the NDK and writing some C code they are probably making POSIX calls not calls to anything Linux specific.

    1. Re:Android is not Linux ... by dindi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Funny you mention this. When I got my first (and last) Android phone, I was honestly expecting a somewhat functional/scriptable Linux environment with Perl, some web server, and a sane package manager. I imagined that I would be able to script behaviour and set up a cron job to make a call or connect to the net......
      I did not even consider, that what I was getting was nothing like that. Besides this little surprise I hated the phone, the experience, everything about it.. including the uselessly slow emulator and the whole eclipse-based dev environment.

  3. Is there something similar that can tip a project? by ron_ivi · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Or perhaps better - tips attached to specific bugs and feature requests in projects - and held in escrow - so they go to people who commit specific fixes to the project?

    I'm not too interested in an escrow service, but personally I liked tvtwm enough I might join a bounty program to bring it back into the mainstream.

    I'd gladly toss a few bucks to fund a bounty to get it back into a major distro.

  4. Re:Welcome to Linux by petteyg359 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's utterly inane attention-grubbing bullshit that needs to stop because it makes all of us look bad. Linux is not GNU/Linux any more than Windows is "GNU/Windows" after you install Cygwin. Do you use the Cerf/Internet every day, and sometimes drive a Lenoir/Car? What did you have for Albertson's/Lunch?

  5. Re:Welcome to Linux by mellon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Indeed. The problem is finding enough icewm users to fund a programmer to do maintenance on it. What the OP really ought to be doing is not looking for someone to work on icewm, but for fellow users.

  6. Re:It's called marketing. by nigels · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I second this. What IceWM needs most is a project manager and an evangelist.

    Do a refresh of the website, reach out to all the known historical developers, start a blog about IceWM - little tutorials about what is good about IceWM, triage the bugs the best you can without diving into the code. If the debian and/or Fedora packages are missing, create some or work with the packaging folks to make them better. Convert the revision history to git and put it up on github, if possible.

    I think there is a decent backlash going on against Unity and Gnome 3. I'm currently using Cinnamon, but I'm fairly willing to give something old-school a try. I was happy with KDE3, then went to Gnome2, and really feeling that Unity is both unstable and inappropriate for work. (I do want to search for things locally without that going to Amazon for advertising purposes) Cinnamon is workable for me, but I'm not rusted onto it.

    Get the pitch right - it's probably not for Grandma, but it might appeal to seasoned developers who don't like instability and don't like any "surprises". One thing that's valuable to me is having something agreeable without much customization. I tend to have various machines with various distros installed, something solid and consistent across all those is a valuable feature to me.

    - Nigel