Ask Slashdot: Aging and Orphan Open Source Projects? 155
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.
Options... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fork" the thing on SourceForge or similar service. SYNC the repos and web pages there over the time while trying to gather collaboration.
Perhaps you can manage to get there what your company doesn't. At very least, this will guarantee the project's surviving when your company shuts the support down.
At very worst, you'll have a way to save the project's source code and documentation to posteriority when the company support ends.
In the mean time, you can negotiate a hand over to Apache, GNU or any other Open/Free Software Foundation.
Re:Options... (Score:5, Informative)
"Fork" the thing on SourceForge or similar service.
Also a Dice holding. Bitbucket or github are in better shape these days.
Re:Options... (Score:5, Funny)
Also a Dice holding. Bitbucket or github are in better shape these days.
Wow! You guys are fast!!
I never expected someone to guess the right name of the project [sourceforge.net] with only the two clues I've given.
Re: Options... (Score:1)
I actually thought sourceforge was closed source .
I read an article about it here "sourceforge fails to forge source" I think .
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SourceForge was open-source in its earliest days, and then they stopped open-sourcing later releases as they added more features that were intended to generate revenue. There was indeed a lot of coverage of SourceForge's failings here, even though both Sourceforge and /. were owned by (I think) VA Software at the time.
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I worked on company that used CollabNet. It was pretty good for large projects.
GutHub is too "code warrior" for my taste. I would bet my coins on BitBucket.
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Also a Dice holding. Bitbucket or github are in better shape these days.
Wow! You guys are fast!!
I never expected someone to guess the right name of the project [sourceforge.net] with only the two clues I've given.
GNU already has a fork of that project - http://savannah.nongnu.org/ [nongnu.org]
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Don't forget Google code. It is unlikely that Google will disappear in a couple years.
Re:Options... (Score:4, Insightful)
and CodePlex, which although hosted my Microsoft does a better UI job of the overall thing than Google Code (which has dropped support for binary releases, telling you to use dropbox or something instead), and has a pretty poor tracker.
I found github to be a bit 'meh' too in terms of usability, though still better than google code.
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.
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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.
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I prefer BitBucket, although recently been moving to GitHub because that's where everyone seems to be. BitBucket UI is great, although it's still lacking statistics (commits, etc) after years of users complaining.
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BitBucket is nice, and the integration with JIRA works nice.
But that SourceTree tool of them... Jisuiz. The Mac version crashes all the time - sometimes I just go for gitk =P
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Google is known for killing their projects and services abruptly though.
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They are know for killing their projects and services but they typically provide a lot of time when they decide to do this.
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Just make sure you get the code saved to archive.org ... they'll be around for a while.
(In all seriousness, I once got the code to an obsolete project by downloading it from an archived webpage that no longer exists.)
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Forget Google code. Google is very happy to shut off the lights on their 20% projects. It's a miracle (or perhaps oversight) that it hasn't already been killed. They've been neglecting power users and programmers over time (they killed google code search for example). They use google code for their own shit so they have to keep it around, right? Wrong. They use fucking github to host many of their open source projects (and they don't use it at all for internal projects). Do you think the McDonald's c
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Why not put the code on several sites? That guarantees it's survival.
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Apache
Apache requires 2 active backers for them take the project. They don't just accept dead cruft; there has to be a community.
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"Fork" the thing on SourceForge or similar service. SYNC the repos and web pages there over the time while trying to gather collaboration.
Perhaps you can manage to get there what your company doesn't. At very least, this will guarantee the project's surviving when your company shuts the support down.
At very worst, you'll have a way to save the project's source code and documentation to posteriority when the company support ends.
In the mean time, you can negotiate a hand over to Apache, GNU or any other Open/Free Software Foundation.
The problem is in finding developers to support the project in the first place...which includes companies being willing to let some of their employees do some of it on company time. The website is NOT the big roadblock here, by a long shot. So forking it accomplishes absolutely nothing, and moving the repository to SourceForge, while not a terrible solution to the "no more website" issue, really doesn't address the true problem.
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The problem is in finding developers to support the project in the first place...which includes companies being willing to let some of their employees do some of it on company time. The website is NOT the big roadblock here, by a long shot. So forking it accomplishes absolutely nothing, and moving the repository to SourceForge, while not a terrible solution to the "no more website" issue, really doesn't address the true problem.
I understood that the problem is the company not willing to do support anymore - ergo, they're not expending any resources on gathering developers to help. You see, you need expend employee's time in order to look for help out there: you can not find what you don't look for.
And, if you don't know, Source Force is not a web site hosting service. It's a full blown software development infrastructure. Code repository, communication, releasing, bug tracking, support.
"Donate" to a Foundation (Score:4)
Re: "Donate" to a Foundation (Score:2, Informative)
Maven, tomcat, lucene, solr, couchdb, Hadoop, wtf are you talking about
Re:"Donate" to a Foundation (Score:4, Interesting)
Apache has a number of vital, rapidly improving projects. The one that I'm using currently is Apache Spark. We use Solr and Nutch, and they are being actively developed. We're excited about Calcite getting to the point that it is fully featured and stable, and that's progressing.
there are plenty of projects that have moved to the Attic, which is where they go for the long, slow retirement and death. And many of the projects are, I would say, lethargic and not frequently updated, because they are large, stable, and feature complete, but likely to be replaced by other projects. Maven is a good example, where I think there is something better, but there is a large, installed userbase that Apache supports.
Based on his (vague) project description, it sounds like apache might be perfect for it.
More specific (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Anyway, in general, keep in mind that maintaining software is boring and does not earn one brownie points.
Motivating people to write the software from scratch might work better.
In that case, make sure your functional specs are up to date.
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+1
Actually naming the project here would help draw attention to it
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+1
Actually naming the project here would help draw attention to it
It also might get them fired. It sounds like the author still works for the company. Posting negatively about your employer in a public forum is a good way to draw unwanted attention to yourself as well.
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Yeah, if it is open source, why be so protective?
No you should not give just anyone commit privileges or blindly accept patches from unknown
sources...but why all the secrecy?
Where/when is the new site? If nothing else, put up a tarball and maybe someone can run with it.
If you / your company is "out" even a tarball is better than nothing. There are many "free" web hosts
available, with various features.
This is 2014, not 1993.
While I can see not wanting to be slashdotted, there is no magic or secret.
Even code
Re:More specific (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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. [povray.org]
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Also:
"under a corporate aegis"
Depending on how the company manages the open source project, this can strongly discourage community members. Even if the company TRIES to encourage community development, a combination of licensing and other behaviors of the company might cause issues.
See http://readwrite.com/2013/08/0... [readwrite.com] - I once saw another article (can't find link) where one of the MariaDB guys said that with the new org structure of MariaDB, they have FAR more community contributions than MySQL ever did,
Re:More specific (Score:5, Insightful)
A bit of Google-fu reveals that osage, the name of the submitter, is also the name a layout/rendering tool [die.net] associated with GraphViz. It's likely old enough to fit the "over 20 years" comment and was the de facto standard until a bunch of javascript graph visualization libraries popped up and made it easier to create prettier, interactive graphs. The latter explains why younger developers might shy away from it: it's written in C instead of javascript. And it was started by AT&T Labs Research to fulfill the corporate aegis bit. And there is a banner on the Graphviz homepage [graphviz.org] trying to attract developers.
So unless this is all coincidence, we may have a winner, which would be sad since I use it on occasion.
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Wow. That IS a bummer. I use it more than "on occasion." I use it a damn lot (it's so much faster than doing even simple graphs with Dia)
Re:More specific (Score:4, Informative)
commit to GitHub (Score:5, Funny)
On GitHub, you don't even need developers. The cloud does everything, through the magical miracles of unicorn sweat and pixie dandruff.
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This is the only actual solution. You dump it on github and plaster the link all over your community pages. If the software is actually important, someone will pick it up and continue maintaining it. If not, it was meant to die, but it's corpse is still there in case someone needs to study it someday.
Ask the project community (Score:4, Insightful)
If you won't support it elsewhere, ask the community if anyone of them want to host/support it. It just requires an i.e. github account to host the code, and the key pieces of information of forums/wiki pages/etc could be move there by the community if there is enough interest.
In the end, if the project wasnt developed exclusively by your company developers, it belongs to the community too.
Re:Ask the project community (Score:5, Interesting)
It also makes sense to raise the issue with downstreams such as Debian, OpenSuse, or Fedora (assuming they exist for the project). Or if it is in one of the enterprise GNU/Linux distributions, approach those vendors.
Why the cloak and dagger? (Score:2, Informative)
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 themsel
Re:Why the cloak and dagger? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it can cause embarrassment to the company to admit that their software is in peril. Maybe this guy doesn't have the authority to make announcements to the public on behalf of his employer.
Re:Why the cloak and dagger? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not much of an "open" source project if you can't even name it, is it?
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Open Source does not mean available to the public. It just means the recipient of software can modify and redistribute freely.
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The generally understood definition In production and development, open source as a development model promotes a universal access via free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone. [wikipedia.org] disagrees with you. Universal = anyone = public.
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As your quote says, you get a license for universal redistribution, but the developer does not have to provide universal redistribution.
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The generally understood definition In production and development, open source as a development model promotes a universal access via free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone. [wikipedia.org] disagrees with you. Universal = anyone = public.
Genrally is not specifically, Most of the GPL' conditions apply to responsibilities that are incured when you distribute not when you develope for internal use. It's perfectly legal to aquire and modify GPLed software or even develope for internal use without giving back to up-stream developers; most consider not giving back to up-stream developers rude and bad form, but it's legal.
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Maybe he's talking about MFC.
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The company is not interested in supporting the software. So if their software is in peril, it is entirely in their hands.
This situation doesn't sound unusual to me. The company originally developed it because it addressed a need/demand at the time. The developers involved took a personal interest in it. The original need has long gone, but the developers have kept it going as a personal project that the company indulges.
But once the original developers leave, the company has no reason to continue thei
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The company is not interested in supporting the software. So if their software is in peril, it is entirely in their hands.
This situation doesn't sound unusual to me. The company originally developed it because it addressed a need/demand at the time. The developers involved took a personal interest in it. The original need has long gone, but the developers have kept it going as a personal project that the company indulges.
But once the original developers leave, the company has no reason to continue their involvement with it. The people using it are not their customers (or are insignificant enough to be customers of no value). They owe it nothing, and suffer no "embarrassment" from walking way from it.
That being said, I don't know why the poster hasn't come out and said what the software is. It may answer a number of questions.
It could be that they haven't announced anything yet, so it could cause "material harm" to the company or put the TFA's author in a bad position in the company to announce something prior to any official annoucement. There are numerous legal reasons to not necessarily name a project; however much the community here may want them to do so.
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Well, for one thing, this discussion is more useful to many of us (who may be in a similar situation) if the comments are kept general. The moment the product is identified, the comments will naturally drift towards issues specific to that situation.
Re:Why the cloak and dagger? (Score:4, Informative)
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Seems to be https://github.com/ellson/grap... [github.com]
Also, why does the website need a machine? Throw it on the free GitHub pages and you'll be fine there.
Let it die with you (Score:4, Informative)
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.
If it is needed, they will come (Score:2)
You have a couple issues that you mention - but without knowing the software this advice is all I got for you...
Complexity repulse new developers (Score:3)
Many projects started with simple code and increased the complexity overs the years up to the point that less and less peoples are willing to learn it. A key to attract new developers is to split the project in smaller parts and let others take the maintenance of those smaller parts. Don't hesitate to use standard libraries whenever possible and don't hesitate to rewrite code to make it easier to read. Up to date documentation and tested tutorial on how to start coding for example an extension might be good advantage.
Close relations with distributions can be a source of new developers instead of a layer that isolate the project from the users. It's an advantage to directly maintain the project in a few leading distribution.
Probably a very important factor for attracting new contributors is how there idea are welcomed at there first post and how there are credited for there effort.
Set a support end date and publicise it (Score:1)
Users can look around and make choices.
Give it a name first (Score:3)
I would suggest you give the project a name first, given from your post it doesn't seem to have one. Then publish on well known site that this project is searching for devs.
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we have a sizable user community and the software is considered one of the de facto standards for what it does.
It probably has one, but the OP wants it kept secret.
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then it deserves to die. either step up and swing the bat or fuck off.
A discussion for the ages - literally (Score:5, Insightful)
This was asked back on Slashdot 14 years ago in 2000. [slashdot.org] As you can see, most of the websites mentioned that archived "ummaintained" software have since evaporated and are unmaintained themselves!
Then it was talked about briefly on stackoverflow in 2009. [stackoverflow.com]
Submitter, what I suggest you do is include a text file that describes the history of the project (If it was me - I think it would be nice to thank those by name who made significant contributions), known issues, ideas for direction of the project (if any), and then post it to Github and Sourceforge as an 'ummaintained' software. With as permissive as a license as you can give it, which will encourage it's use down the road. Also, I would post links, notices, and intentions to any associated forums. And give the community as much time to as possible before closing the website down. Maybe someone or some company will have the where with all to continue the project. If it is reasonable to do so and they seem to be reputable and serious, you might let them. Otherwise, when finished, make sure that archive.org has browsed the website for their archives. Also, post a copy the final software there. If it has a domain name, if you can, I'd give it a ten year renewal date and give it a notice of closure and a link to the project on Github.
But the larger issue for me, is that you, your colleagues, and friends spent time and effort on this project. That should be recognized. At least by acknowledging that support is ceasing for this project, it can hopefully move on to other hands in the future. It does happen. [wired.com]
I wish more more programmers were as thoughtful as you. And I wish there were better ways (i.e. more permanent and standardized) of dealing with orphanware.
Close vote (Score:2)
I think this question is not right for SO. It can be closed under different reasons
- Primarily Opinion Based
- Too Broad
- Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
I don't have a SO login in thi
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Most closed questions are closed by regular users not moderators. I think you need 3000 points as a user to have a close vote.
It's called marketing. (Score:4, Informative)
Said this already a while back on a simular problem:
It's called marketing. [slashdot.org]
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 [typo3.org] 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 [oreilly.com].
Hope I could help. And good luck finding a heir for your project.
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Very well pointed out. Professional website themes are inexpensive these day to the point that anyone using hand-scrawls like http://www.graphviz.org/ [graphviz.org] are just asking for disdain.
software (Score:1)
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It's: Project who must not be named.
[probably Bash :-)]
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That doesn't do you any good without a decollator and a burster [machineadvantage.com]
Post the name (Score:2)
Having said that, I hope the project is called facebook.
Join the club, welcome. (Score:1)
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Don't "fork" it. Don't put it on github. Delete it (Score:3)
Take down the Web site. Eliminate all official downloads.
First, people shouldn't be encouraged to use unmaintained software.
Second, if somebody really depends on it, they're put on notice that they now have to step up and support it.
Retired developers (Score:5, Funny)
or are close to retirement.
Wouldn't a retired person have a lot of time on their hands to contribute to the project? Or it's customary in your country for all people at retirement age to perform ritual suicide?
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Maybe the just don't want to. They are under no obligation to do that. The entire idea behind FOSS is that the users would put in the "effort" to improve and maintain it.
That can be money to pay for someone to work on it or working on it themselves.
Just because you have worked on a FOSS project does not mean you are a slave for life to it.
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Or it's customary in your country for all people at retirement age to perform ritual suicide?
No, we just let them starve to death.
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Have you considered starting a company around the OSS Project? It's typical for a project in your position to spawn a commercial support entity to satisfy support needs, the $$ for which is also used to develop/support the project.
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How dare they refuse to work for free on a project that benefits me.
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No, those retired developers.
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" It is obvious that any current contributors would be most interested in working on it future, more than any other potential contributor."
No it isn't. I worked on a device driver for a Linux based SBC at my last job.
I have zero interest in working on that for free now that I have a different job.
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What is it? (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:3)
If your user community is there... (Score:2)
... then you should be able to get someone to step up and do it.
Implement Systemd (Score:3)
just anounce you'll implement Systemd support, they'll fork you in a minute
Same thing with OS/2 Source code (Score:3)
I'm doing the following:
1) I had organized all source code I was able to find on GitHub:
- Created a Organization on github - https://github.com/os2world [github.com]
- Organized the repos in "named-categories"
2) Created a Wiki to organize the catalog.
3) I will upload a copy of all repositories and a wiki dump to the Internet Archive. http://www.archive.org/ [archive.org]
This are my steps to try that the source code do not get lost.
Move on and other thoughts (Score:2)
an open source project for over 20 years under a corporate aegis.
There is your mistake. The corp will do what it likes.
we have a sizable user community and the software is considered one of the de facto standards for what it does.
Both of those need qualifications. For example 20,000 people might sound like a lot but it is not a sizable user base. One of the defacto.... one of out of how many? If there are 2 or more standards that work nearly as well.... Well there you go.
If there are other projects that are viable with thes
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On saying that though, the original question is pretty crap - no details of said project given.
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The GP should be modded +5, Painful Truth.
Re:Depends on the project (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd rather write a replacement product then help old software limp along. Also old code tends to be ..........
Mature, debugged, and well documented?
Re:Depends on the project (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think I've EVER seen old code that's well documented. Not even stuff from my own larval "Document all the things!" phase... I think subversion feeds on comments.
Well, on comments and release engineers' tears, when it comes time to merge...
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lol...well documented. Score should be 5, Funny
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He said "then", but he meant "than".
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The CADT Model (Score:2)
Ahh, the good ol' CADT model [jwz.org] of development.