

What are some notable dead open source projects - briztol

Question for the group: What are the most notable, largest open source communities that have subsequently died? Which communities grew largest before failing?
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10dpd
ARC? :)

<http://arclanguage.org>

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kaolinite
I know some people will disagree with this one but: Diaspora. Last I heard
they were recoding the entire thing which is never a good sign. Oh and I just
did a search for them - they're not even first in the Google results anymore
(for me, at least), unless <https://joindiaspora.com/> belongs to the project
too (doesn't seem to).

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debacle
They're in YCS12, which means we probably wont see anything for a while. I
have a feeling people aren't going to be impressed with what they see.

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Rickasaurus
I feel pretty dumb asking but, what's YCS12? The google results don't turn up
much.

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tnorthcutt
ycombinator, summer 2012 group/class.

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cjbprime
I'd have to go with what I consider to be the cautionary tale of FreeBSD,
which was far more popular before Apple decided to use it for their OS X
kernel without giving anything back, and now seems to have no modern relevance
at all. I think it's a pretty good anecdotal argument in favor of the GPL on
consequentialist grounds.

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kaolinite
FreeBSD is still used! In fact, it's one of the more innovative OSes. There
are tonnes of features in FreeBSD that just aren't available in any other OS.
I highly doubt Apple had anything to do with its diminishing popularity,
however. In fact, I would say it's due more to the increase in virtualisation
(which FreeBSD does not perform well at in comparison to Linux) and the
increase in user-friendly Linux distributions (FreeBSD is trickier to set up;
that was ok when Linux was tricky too).

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lazyjeff
ReiserFS. After Reiser was convicted for murder.

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Anurag_Jain
Does someone remember opensolaris ??

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cjbprime
It didn't die under its own steam so much as be killed by its parent, though.

Chandler (<http://chandlerproject.org/>) had a rather fantastic amount of
money spent on it as an open-source project to no avail.

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5945934578329
Firefox.

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Tangaroa
Procmail hasn't updated in over ten years. Maybe it's done.

The BSDs are always dying. They do seem to be less influential than they were
ten or fifteen years ago.

Enlightenment was popular before Gnome and KDE got better but it relied too
much on one programmer and stopped updating.

Amaya was supposed to be the web's standard browser. It's still being
produced, but last I checked it was a decade behind anything else in features.

I don't know how big the developer communities for any of them got.

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rodw
Amaya was a "standard browser" in the sense that it was intended to showcase
web standards:

"Work on Amaya started at W3C in 1996 to showcase Web technologies in a fully-
featured Web client. The main motivation for developing Amaya was to provide a
framework that can integrate as many W3C technologies as possible. It is used
to demonstrate these technologies in action while taking advantage of their
combination in a single, consistent environment." - <http://www.w3.org/Amaya/>

I don't think it was ever intended to compete with Mosaic or Netscape or Nexus
or whatever was popular at the time.

Amaya is a reference implementation.

