

Small project's life depends on his owner - Nic0
http://www.nicosphere.net/small-projects-life-depends-on-his-owner/

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ejames
There have been attempts to organize this, including one I know off the top of
my head[1].

There are two problems. One is that an orderly transfer of control requires a
certain amount of planning and coordination, which are precisely the resources
that aren't available when a maintainer has left (or is on the way out). The
other is that people tend to become maintainers of other peoples' projects by
climbing the open source 'career ladder' from user to minor contributor to
major contributor; projects are stable when they have enough contributors that
the most-productive non-maintainer can be promoted to maintainer status when
the original author leaves.

GitHub helps by making it easy and obvious to fork something and eventually
have your repo promoted to be the 'official' one, but as with many problems in
open source, finding a particular, specific person who actually does that is
the hard part.

[1]<http://thechangelog.com/post/1986814704/stillmaintained>

~~~
sciurus
Ironically, <http://stillmaintained.com> is closing down.

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TamDenholm
This would be a nice feature for github. Also, additionally, if there was an
abandoned open source project that had no activity on it after a certain time
period, and the project owner went AWOL, a user could petition to take it
over, get X votes and it would be auto transferred over. The project owner
could stop the process simply by logging into their user account.

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flexd
Isn't that exactly why GitHub is great? Love it, fork it, maintain it!

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RyanMcGreal
I really like this idea of an orphanage for abandoned projects.

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sciurus
Debian keeps track of packages that need new maintainers. With the large
amount of software they package, it seems like the Debian project would be in
a good position to create a similar list of packages where the upstream has
become inactive.

<http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/>

