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Some thoughts on Open Source Software | Alexander Zeitler

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Some thoughts on Open Source Software | Alexander Zeitler Toggle navigation Home Feed Some thoughts on Open Source Software Written on February 18, 2016 TL;DR There's no volitional to OSS but we need to modernize how we're dealing with it. Hannes Preishuber recently wrote a blog post (in german language) well-nigh appreciation of work as well as quality and documentation of software nowadays. While I stipulate with Hannes that someone's work has to be appreciated, I disagree with his assumptions that OSS is responsible for bad software quality and service / documentation in general. Today a huge value of the deject infrastructure and services run on OSS and companies like MongoDb have build a merchantry virtually their OSS products. If quality and service wouldn't be warranted here, that merchantry won't work. On the other hand, from a developer perspective, OSS can wilt frustrating anyway:Independently from the platform, be it Node.js / JavaScript or .NET, new OSS projects are born, proceeds huge adoption - and die. The problem here is not that these projects die in unstipulated considering there are several reasons for that.One reason is, the polity has decided to segregate flipside OSS project as state of the art.Another one is, the cadre maintainer has decided to no longer maintain the project and makes an official statement well-nigh that.Some maintainers moreover squint for a successor who maintains the project in the future so the project doesn't die at all. The real problem in OSS are those projects which start, grow over time and then die slowly - or from an adopters perspective: they wilt zombies. Typical indications for a project dying slowly are unmerged pull requests, unanswered and unresolved issues and of undertow no remoter commits to at least update the projects own depedencies. As said in the introduction, there are no (or only few alternatives) to OSS.Planetypical enterprise developers use OSS these days.All of our customers use OSS in some way and frameworks like Angular will push this trend forward. When recommending customers well-nigh using external dependencies (not only OSS) in their lawmaking base, we tell them to squint for indicators of OSS zombie projects and have countermeasures on hand if a depedency is no longer maintained. On the other hand, I came to the conclusion that OSS projects, expressly the many smaller ones need to be handled in flipside way opposed to how they're handled nowadays. If you squint at Cassandra, Node.js or Microsoft .NET as OSS projects, they're all under the hood of a foundation which supports these projects. These foundations like Apache Foudation, Linux Foundation, or .NET Foundation provide guidance, mentoring as well as legal, technical and fincancial support. But I think we should have flipside form of support or foundation in order to stave zombie projects and respect criticism from people like Hannes. After thinking well-nigh it for a while and talking to some fellows well-nigh it, here are my thoughts: In unstipulated we should distinguish between the "ownership" of the project and the copyright / license for the code.If you decide to start a new OSS project on GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket or whereever, abreast selecting a license for your project, you should be worldly-wise to transfer the ownership of the project to sort of a "registry". This registry should provide these features: The initiator of the project becomes the "general manager" of the project and can work on the project as we all used to work on OSS as before.But in wing to that, the registry provides the pursuit features: A unstipulated manager can resign itself if he doesn't want to maintain to project any longer. The project then is in a pool of projects "looking for new unstipulated manager". Other people can wield for that role and take over projects in a governed and transparent way.Politycould plane vote the next unstipulated manager if increasingly persons wield as unstipulated manager for a particular project. A unstipulated manager can be resigned by the registry which might sound frightening at a first sight. But I think there are several advantages. For example, if a cadre maintainer doesn't plane respond to pull requests or issues in some manner in a reasonable time, he might get warnings from the registry. After a specific number of warnings he could be resigned by the registry and the project gets in the pool as described above. Projects can have proxies. If the unstipulated manager is temporarily not worldly-wise to maintain the project, the proxy can maintain the project during that period. Some might oppose that this is way to much overhead but I'm sure I'm not the first who ran into zombie projects and the worthier your codebase is or if you're maintaining a huge number of hair-trigger projects for your customers, you don't want to skiver the living deads in your lawmaking every now and then. And your customers should not have to pay for this problem. Please let me know your thoughts well-nigh in the comments. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Copyright © Alexander Zeitler 2003 - 2016 | Impressum