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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.
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"
The software came out of the Research organization which at the time had a wide mandate. As there was no interest within the company of capitalizing on it, we were able to get it released as open source (currently, with the Eclipse license). As the software provided a platform for our research, work on it was encouraged. Of late, the company has greatly curtailed research, firing many and convincing many others to leave voluntarily, and restricting work to a few areas. We have moved the code base to GitHub but have kept the web site on its current machine until we decide what to do. As with most companies, managers can be touchy about employees airing concerns publicly.
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.