Unmaintained free software [LWN.net]

One of the great advantages of free software is that, should a program's maintainer get bored and cease working on it, somebody else can always step in and keep things going. But what if nobody else steps in? Sometimes unmaintained software will languish because nobody has any interest in it anymore; in such cases, it should be allowed to fade away. But, at other times, the problem is just a lack of information. The people who might be interested in taking over a project simply do not know that the need exists.

One effort which is trying to help in this regard is the unmaintained free software wiki. This site lists free software which is currently in need of a maintainer, helpfully categorized and with a search engine to help those searching for a project to help out. As of this writing, there are 73 projects listed, the most recently added being Fontutils, a2ps, and rpm.

Unfortunately, this project itself looks like it could benefit from a bit of maintenance. Only seven projects have been added since the beginning of the year, and only two (Gnome Commander and khtml2png) are listed as having been adopted. Perhaps the problem is simply one of awareness; If relatively few people even know that this site exists, few are unlikely to make use of it. If that is the case, then, hopefully, this article will help a bit.

Certainly it seems like there should be a place for a facility like this. Projects do go unmaintained over time, and there is not always somebody standing by ready to take over. There are also developers who are in search of ways to contribute to the community, but who are unclear on where their efforts might best be put. Connecting the two can only be a good thing to do. The infrastructure is there to do a good job of joining projects in need with developers; we just need people to make more use of it.

(Log in to post comments)

Unmaintained free software

Posted Nov 3, 2006 13:59 UTC (Fri) by samj (subscriber, #7135) [Link]

Debian already contains much of the 'interesting' software out there - being able to flag a given source package as unmaintained-upstream could be useful; see WNPP for how this is handled on the packaging front.

Unmaintained free software

Posted Nov 7, 2006 4:18 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

Only seven projects have been added since the beginning of the year, and only two (Gnome Commander and khtml2png) are listed as having been adopted.

Vacation just got adopted, too.

Some projects, however, seem pointless--for example, ksmp3play (Yet Another MP3 Player, whee) and Golgotha Forever (big idea by one of the ex-id developers, IIRC, but far more in need of being written in the first place than simply maintained).

And then there are all of those "twilight" projects, Free or otherwise--e.g., Info-ZIP Zip/UnZip, which is still chugging along but could use some more coders; or XV, which is shareware-with-source, long since abandoned by its owner, and which I halfway maintain because I still use it so much. I also have more than a dozen projects that I "maintain" but tend to forget how long it's been since I last pushed my internal changes out (several years in more than one case); fortunately they're all pretty small, so no one much notices. ;-)

I could also swear that there was a much older web site tracking unmaintained F/OSS, but I can't find the link offhand.

Oh well...

Greg

!maintained free software

Posted Nov 9, 2006 16:40 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

To me the sign of un/under/mismaintained software is the large number of non-trivial -- and often different -- patches within distribution packages.

Yep, pppd itself is rather there too. Really nobody using GPRS?

I'd also point a finger at hotplug/udev/hal -- some forgotten, some maintained to a degree where /dev/cdrom is considered obsolete and arcane (someone clearly forgot the 80/20 rule and common sense).

And at module-init-tools which were kinda proof of concept or example code and AFAIK are still included as a standalone crucial package in most distros (at least one of them still taking the plunge to integrate the new code with older but feature-complete modutils). This was brought up at xvendor@ a few years ago but to no avail.

Just today discussed what's up with ppp... doubt we'll still find enough patience to step forward.