Transferring the Leadership of Open Source Projects?

Frabcus asks: "I founded an Open Source project TortoiseCVS, a Windows Explorer shell extension for using CVS, but now I'm looking to hand on project management to someone else. When I started out, I had an itch to scratch. We started using CVS at work and I didn't like the interface for WinCVS, so I made a better one. Now it's a year and a half later and TortoiseCVS does everything that I want it to, so I'd like to move on to other things and let someone else take it on. There have been over 20,000 downloads, so I have quite a large user base, but not many people are active in supplying patches. Do you guys have experience of handing on an Open Source project? How did you find someone who has similar goals that will fit in with the existing code?" The thing to do is to start asking around in development circles. The best starting place, of course, is among the existing user-base. For those of you who have transferred Open Source projects, how did you go about finding your successor?

Another well timed submission on this same subject, mrgrumpy follows up with this query: "Quite some time ago (around 1997-1998) I built a Java based adventure game called World. Developed with Java1.1 (and at the time it was fairly leading edge, it now looks a bit tired), you run around, collect treasure and kill things. As with all my great projects (hey, I won a Sparc5 for this), I had always intended to finish it, but never did. Now I want to give it away to a good home where developers will continue to work on the code and bring my ideas to completion.

Every now and then I sit down and have a look at the code but I don't really have the energy left to complete it (most of my energy was soaked up with my Masters degree). Other projects have taken over now, and I'm planning to go overseas for 12-18 months, so I know I won't get back to it for a very, very long time in any serious way.

I am happy to give the code away if a team of developers want to continue developing it. I can act as a grandfather figure to the project to give guidance and wisdom, and to clarify what my vision was, and what the code does. I'd prefer it to be GPL'd or a similar license that won't shut the code up.

There was another project similar to this one called White Orb, which seems to have gone the way of the dodo, a shame because it had a lot of potential, so I don't want to release this one and have it gather dust. I could set the project up somewhere like SourceForge, but as I said I'd rather just hand it all over to someone else and just look after it.

If you're interested, you could email me, or just leave a comment below. I want to pick either a team, or an individual who I can be confident in that they'll get the project up and running."

So here are two projects looking for good homes. What's the best way of giving up control of an Open Source project (with the potential of varying degrees of continued project development by the original maintainer) in the hopes of it continuing on in good health?

GAIM

[akiaki007]

That was a success in ownership hand down. Perhaps you should ask them how they did it.

Parallels with Perl and CPAN

[MeerCat]

use.perl.org [perl.org] (running SlashCode) has a similar topic for CPAN modules up for adoption.

I (and the company) use it

[SerpentMage]

While I think that you might be disappointed that not many folks are actually supplying patches there are two reasons for this.

1) It is really good and does not need much in terms of patches. I use it all the time and I love it.

2) Debugging a Windows Shell Extension is a royal pain in the ass. I actually tried to debug Tortoise because I wanted to change a few things. But I gave up when debugging became difficult.

As a result it says one thing. You did a great job....

Unmaintained Free Software

[uh1763]

Hi all.

OK, shameless plug, but anyways, this is IMHO exactly what these people are looking for...

Unmaintained Free Software [unmaintain...ftware.org] is a site which keeps track of unmaintained (or orphaned) Free Software related projects.

It's a central place for people who want to

• find out whether a project is unmaintained or not
  
• find a project they can work on
  
• announce that their own project is not maintained anymore and that they search a new maintainer for it
  
• gather some statistical data about why Free Software related projects become unmaintained, how long it takes to find a new maintainer (if at all), etc...
  

The ultimate goal of the site is to help find a new maintainer for software which is currently unmaintained.

Any comments, questions or other feedback (patches anyone?) is highly welcome...

Uwe.

Tortoise Rocks!

[nambit]

I found tortoise after needing something to let a designer keep his pages in the same CVS repository as my code. All i can say is that it's absolutly fantastic - the designer hasn't really got a clue about CVS, but using tortoise is so simple it hurts...

right-click, "commit"...
right-click, "update"...

makes me smile whenever i see emails from the cvs server with the designer's name on them.

to the guy who wrote it - thank you so much for making using cvs a joy under windows. what on earth do you think tortoise should be doing that it isn't now? the thing's finished as far as i can see! (and yes, that does mean it sends email ;-)

post it on www.unmaintained-free-software.org

[utoddl]

If you have or know of a project that no longer has its leader(s), post it on http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/ [unmaintain...ftware.org]. At least people will have a chance to find it. Check it out; you might be surprised what's there -- gs [unmaintain...ftware.org] f'rinstance.

Re:You know what we need?

[ebbe11]

A home for abandoned & elderly Open Source projects.

Such a place [sourceforge.net] has existed for some time now.

Re:rule number one

[Amokscience]

First read some of this:

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_10/bezro uk ov/
Second, as an open source author myself of a program that has received about as many downloads as the first questioner, I know my project would probably die if I left. It's a good project and I provide lots and lots of documentation and it's useful (in business) to thousands of people. Still, if I don't do work no one else does.

Not that there hasn't been a lot of interest but people usually lose interst or make it do what they want and after a couple patches go about their business. I don't have any serious complaints about it but it can be somewhat frustrating seeing all new faces all the time.

The only projects that will survive the project leader's departure are those with strong core groups or a strong hierarchy of leaders and co-leaders.
I consider my project fairly successful and it's the work of basically just me. No team. That's just one counter-example but there are countless others like it in the open source community. Maybe if my project was sexier I would have more developers, who knows.

Luckily for me and my users I still have enough fire and drive (for now) to 'finish' my project.
My advice to people wanting to step down (with no clear successor) would be to put out feelers, grab about 3 people, give them full access, and wish for magic to happen.