
FOSS Zombies - pferde
https://davidalfonso.es/posts/foss-zombies
======
StavrosK
If you come across such a Zombie, please ask for it to be added to the Code
Shelter ([https://www.codeshelter.co/](https://www.codeshelter.co/)) so
projects can be resurrected later. Also, I would encourage you to join
yourself, since we always need more maintainers. There's no work requirement,
you can simply maintain projects if and when one excites you.

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john_moscow
I'm not sure I get the drama. The beauty of FOSS is that nothing usually stops
you from just forking the project and continuing to maintain it the way you
see fit. If the original project is dead in the water, people looking for new
releases or fixes will find you very soon and will be grateful. Just leave
some links in the comments to the issues that you fixed in your fork and
people will find it.

I've done this several times and never really bothered to get an "official"
redirection from the original project. In most of the cases, Google just
picked it up and eventually prioritized my maintained fork over the original
zombie, as people posted more and more links to it. A couple of times the
original author noticed and shared a quick update of "hey, this dude is
maintaining the project now, kudos to him, go to his site for the latest
build".

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einpoklum
The opening example is not actually of FOSS zombies... because _you_ are
someone who knows the project and is interested in pushing it forward (and
conceivably, might maintain it).

Real FOSS zombies have _users_ depending on them, and expecting to see
maintenance or updates, but nobody to carry those tasks out. The linked-to
article is more about "Zombie project steering". IMHO.

~~~
zozbot234
Those users could pay for someone to pick up maintenance and support.

~~~
protomyth
I'm not sure some of the users actually knows the state of the FOSS project. I
would bet there are more than a few businesses that have software they paid
for that has some code from these projects.

~~~
jdsully
If it works well enough that nobody has noticed support has stopped... Maybe
the software is done?

~~~
protomyth
In general, I would agree, but you are one OS upgrade from failure (see Mac OS
Catalina). I would imagine some testing will surface that the company needs to
act.

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rolltiide
> It's important to distinguish between a "FOSS zombie" and a project which is
> simply done. If that's the case, you'll find out easily by reading the
> documentation.

I'm glad they mentioned that. Package managers and developers routinely
neglect this possibility.

~~~
fortran90
This! One of my pet peeves is when someone recommends a software and then
someone else looks at its GitHub commits or last release date and claims that
the project is unmaintained because there has been no activity in it for a
while.

Some projects do not need any maintenance. They work as is. Lack of activity
does not imply bad software.

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oaiey
Some indicators mentioned would trigger on mature and complete software.

~~~
Semaphor
From the section "Conclusions":

> It's important to distinguish between a "FOSS zombie" and a project which is
> simply done. If that's the case, you'll find out easily by reading the
> documentation.

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leggomylibro
Serious question, because I'm not very well-versed in open-source philosophy.

Isn't this around the time that you make a fork of the zombie?

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Yes, it's often the time to fork and take over. But it's a big project in
itself, not everyone wants to be the new developer-in-chief.

Sometimes, a project can stay at the borderline of death and alive - there
still can be minimum maintenance by a not-so-active developer, major
distributions still have packages for it, etc. I recently sent a patch to a
project - it took 11 months, but it was eventually merged when a developer
with commit access finally noticed it. There was no motivation for me to fork
it since all I wanted to merge was a simple fix, I was not planning to take
over the project.

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app4soft
I'll be waiting for FLOSS Zombies & Open-Source (not FREE) Zombies.

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baybal2
David, what is your point writing this?

