Two Years of Unmaintained Free Software

Uwe Hermann writes: "Pretty exactly two years ago I started to work on the Unmaintained Free Software site. The site has come a long way since then, so here's a small coverage of the new features, the projects which have been added, those which already have found a new maintainer, and some more or less interesting statistics." This is a great project, the kind of thing that's not glamorous, just useful, interesting and needed. Uwe's report is below. (And Oh Yes, there are plenty of unclaimed projects for interested maintainers to adopt.) This also seems a nice time to point out that you could be reading this story from the Developers section slashbox, which you can turn on by adjusting your preferences.

1) What is Unmaintained Free Software?

Unmaintained Free Software is a database of orphaned or unmaintained Free Software related projects, i.e. projects that aren't developed any longer and have no maintainer.

A project is considered unmaintained, if

• the author says so on the project's homepage or on a mailing list etc.
• there hasn't been any activity (releases, CVS, mailing lists, homepage, etc.) for a long time. In that case, someone (read: me) emails the author and asks about the status of the project. If I don't get an answer within two weeks, I usually add the project to the site.

For more information about the site, please read the About page...

2) History

I wrote the very first version of the site in late 1999. At that time the project was called Unmaintained Linux and consisted of nothing more than a few static HTML pages. In April 2000 I rewrote the whole thing using PHP for the code and MySQL as the database backend and called it Unmaintained Free Software. There have been quite a few changes since then, read below.

3) Features

Some features which I have added since version 0.1 include:

• A (quite simple) search box.
• A Show-A-Random-Unmaintained-Project box.
• "Slashboxes" for Freshmeat, Newsforge and - you guessed it - Slashdot.
• The news (new projects, updated projects) are also available as an RSS feed for automated processing. You can also get the whole database dump , if you like.
• Lots of statistics are available, e.g. Top 10 licenses, Top 10 programming languages, Top 10 reasons why projects become unmaintained, Top 10 search query strings, etc. etc. Read the Statistics Page for details.
• Lots more. Read the ChangeLog .

Oh yes, did I mention that the code behind the site is GPL'd? No? Oh well, stupid me ...

4) Statistics

I already mentioned the Statistics Page . Here's a small overview of where we stand today ...

As I am writing this, there are 133 projects listed as unmaintained on the site. Among the still unmaintained projects are lots of small or unknown projects, but there's also a lot of quite "high-profile" projects which are unmaintained, e.g. GLchess , Golgotha (Remember? It's that RTS game started by crack.com), GTKsee , gv and finally (sadly) icewm .

Some of those projects which have already found a new maintainer include fakebo , Jump'n'Bump , TortoiseCVS and UML Sculptor . All in all, 30 projects have found a new maintainer already, the rest is still waiting for some talented coder to adopt them (hint, hint) ...

5) Call for help

I want YOU for Unmaintained Free Software!

There's lots of possibilities how you can contribute:

• Spot unmaintained projects and add them to Unmaintained Free Software.
• Even more important: Adopt unmaintained projects and continue their development!
• Send suggestions, report broken links, file bug-reports, fix bugs, send patches for the code etc. etc.

6) The End

So that's the end of my small article. Hope you liked it.

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If you have questions about Unmaintained Free Software, or would like to contribute some time to the project, comments are welcome.

Re:Turning on all stories to the front page

[jamie]

"at some point I found a way to set slashdot so that every story from every section went to the front page for me"

Click preferences [slashdot.org] on the menu at the left, then check "Collapse Sections." Then click "Save."

OT: Turning on all stories to the front page

[maol]

I've told friends about this and they've asked me how to do it, but after digging through the preferences, I honestly can't find it anywhere....???

preferences [slashdot.org] -> activate "Collapse Sections (show stories from all sections, unless specifically excluded) - Save.

A reason

[shemnon]

Has it crossed anyone's mind as to why some of these projects are unmainted? One particular one I saw was "Harmony," which was a replacement for QT. QT now has a GPL licence and this Harmony is mostly irrelevent. Harmony served it's purpose, to create a GPL licenced replacement for QT, except the replacement was QT itself.

As a former author of an open source project some of these projects should reamin dead. Mine was a JSP compiler and engine under the GPL, and when Jakarta finally realsed the first drop of the Tomcat code I put the nail in the coffin of my code, and it sohuld stay dead! Just because a project was alive at one point shouldn't mean it must be maintained on life support. Being put out to pasture is a normal and healthy part of the software development lifecycle, especially when it is superceded by more vibrant and relevant software.

Re:A reason

[Wolfger]

"As a former author of an open source project some of these projects should reamin dead."


Well, if they should, they probably will. Others, like icewm, will find new owners because their time has not yet come, and the users of the software desire to keep it alive. I think this site embodies the heart of the GPL... Software doesn't need to die just because the owner no longer has time/interest to invest in the project.

Re:A reason

[j7953]

One particular one I saw was "Harmony," which was a replacement for QT.

Well, it's listed as "Reason :: Project is obsolete :: There are better alternatives"

There's nothing wrong with listing it as unmaintained, though. No one says that all of these projects should live one, but if you start excluding projects from the database because someone thinks they shouldn't live on, wouldn't that limit the usefulness of the database?

Note that finding new maintainers isn't the only possible use of the database, it could e.g. also be used when you're planning to start a new project to find out what mistakes similar projects made that caused them to fail. Of course, that requires appropriate documentation, but at the very least you can look at the projects to get some ideas for your own one. And maybe, though less likely, you can even find a codebase from which you can move on.

Re:A reason

[crisco]

Another good reason for a list is when researching a project or problem you find an obscure Usenet posting on Google refering to a project and further searching doesn't turn up anything. Finding it in a database like this quickly lets you know the status and whether it is going to solve your particular problem.

From the takes-too-long-to-type dept.:

[QuietRiot]

I think something like http://bleachedmeat.org would be a good domain name for a site like this. Much easier to type!

Maintained?

["Zow"]

Oh yes, did I mention that the code behind the site is GPL'd?

But is it maintained?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

-"Zow"

Re:IceWM Dead?

[uh1763]

Hi.

Well, according to this post [debian.org], it is unmaintained... If you have any more recent information, please update [unmaintain...ftware.org] the site.

Re:Wow...

[jx100]

Hmm... that and all the software with "X"es on them, and I think this might be Bill GAtes' favorite pro-GPL site