Co-opt popular abandonware opensource project? Thoughts?
- by Mike Bouck
Here's the scenario: A popular open source project is used/loved by many but has become stale due to the fact that the last drop came out nearly a year ago. Many bugs/feature requests/fixes have been logged in the interim and everyone is getting by via downloading the trunk and building custom/private builds with the changes incorporated. The copyright is simple -- there is none and the code is in the public domain. The project owner spins the project as community open source and has setup a sourceforge site, but to date (5 years running now) has yet to accept one contributor. In otherwords the "community" is a community of one. The project owner takes great pride in the project and has obviously contributed a lot of time/effort but for whatever reason has has seemingly abandoned the project and is unresponsive when offers of help are made. So, the question, should the community fork the codebase, setup a new community site, and take matters in their own hands?
