FOSS Zombies | Hacker News Reader

FOSS Zombies

davidalfonso.es

42 pointspferde17 comments

If you come across such a Zombie, please ask for it to be added to the Code Shelter (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.

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".

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.

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

I find this is quite difficult to do in practice.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

Some indicators mentioned would trigger on mature and complete software.

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.

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?

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.

Some zombie projects are far too large for an individual to consider maintaining.

OpenOffice is a perfect example of such a project.

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

David, what is your point writing this?

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