Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Aging and Orphan Open Source Projects?
osage writes: Several colleagues and I have worked on an open source project for over 20 years under a corporate aegis. Though nothing like Apache, we have a sizable user community and the software is considered one of the de facto standards for what it does. The problem is that we have never been able to attract new, younger programmers, and members of the original set have been forced to find jobs elsewhere or are close to retirement. The corporation has no interest in supporting the software. Thus, in the near future, the project will lose its web site host and be devoid of its developers and maintainers. Our initial attempts to find someone to adopt the software haven't worked. We are looking for suggestions as to what course to pursue. We can't be the only open source project in this position.
"Fork" the thing on SourceForge or similar service.
Also a Dice holding. Bitbucket or github are in better shape these days.
Since when have open source projects been about cloak and dagger? Name it, explain it, and Slash users can tell you what the best option is. As a general rule, you can stick it on Source Forge under a known license and promote it on Slashdot and it sinks or swims, but even if it stagnates, OLD CODE STILL RUNS and lives on past its developers.
The nature of open source is that you offer it to *everyone* under a known license, so if your user bases really uses it, they can have the code and maintain it themselves.
Yours wouldn't be the first software that has become abandonware. Users may appreciate the stability of an unchanging release. If it's distributed under a Libre license, then it can be forked and redistributed, but chances are that kids would rather make their own mistakes than work on your program.
Have a nice time.
Said this already a while back on a simular problem:
It's called marketing.
In short:
If your project is (re)presented properly, you'll have people falling over each other to claim gouvernance over it.
I'd put it into a foundation - after refurbishing it's outward representation!
Example: Typo3's architecture looks like it's designed by monkees on crack, it's config language TypoScript is so bizar - in concept and in implementaion - I can't even describe it and there are a countless other strange things about this software. Yet it has a professional website, ressonable documentation and a solid brand, brandbook included(!). I doubt the Typo3 Foundation has problems finding heralds for it's project. There even are Oreilly's on it.
Hope I could help. And good luck finding a heir for your project.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Could you be a little more specific about the kind of software this is about?
That might reveal why people shy away from the project.
Tangentially, you manage to bring up a very good point. One huge problem is the software projects might be using. A number of companies open sourced their software before the notion of a 'standardized' license method became prevalent. If a project is not Mozilla, GPL, or BSD compatible then it will have a very hard time attracting new developers. I know would not want to work on something that did not have a useful open source license. I would encourage the submitter to make sure whatever he is working on have a standard, permissive as possible license (if possible) before he closes shop.
I know one interesting project (from a historical perspective) that suffers from this is the Open Watcom compiler with its non-compatible Sybase Public License. This project fits the submitter's description to a tee. I bet there are others like this. At least POV-Ray got around to fixing their license finally.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I'm not sure what the best one to use is, based on functionality and usability rather than something that has 'git' in the name or some vague "startup coolness". If anyone can enlighten us, I'd appreciate it.
I've found Bitbucket to be exceptionally nice, with free public and private repositories, online editing, wiki, etc., but as a lowly user I cannot vouch for its long-term stability.
They are know for killing their projects and services but they typically provide a lot of time when they decide to do this.
Maven, tomcat, lucene, solr, couchdb, Hadoop, wtf are you talking about
Actually, I intend to continue to work on it after retiring, but at some time illness, death or some such personal this is going to get involved. It would be nice to have new people involved before then. Also, when the last of us has left the company, it will be difficult to convince the company to continue hosting the web site.
The software is fairly general-purpose, being used in software engineering, bioinformatics, network engineering and social networks, to name a few areas. I should also have noted that we're not just considering maintenance. The underlying field has a lot of work going on it. There are plenty of opportunities to develop new algorithms and provide new features.