Maintainers Wanted, open source projects looking for new maintainers | Hacker News Reader

Maintainers Wanted, open source projects looking for new maintainers

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180 pointsjrpt32 comments

A lot of projects end up abandoned because their maintainers wanted to move on but couldn't find anyone to reliably take over.

I thought it'd be useful to create a list of projects looking for new maintainers: Maintainers Wanted.

If you know of any projects that should be added, feel free to make a pull request or write an issue!

But do you expect many people to want to maintain a software project, but not know or care which one?

Obviously trying to contact the author or previous maintainer of an abandoned project can be difficult, but then even this wouldn't help much as they'd still need to transfer ownership to the new maintainer(s). Maybe you could offer an 'ownership escrow service' for your target audience too. That would be potentially very helpful for people that really want to wash their hands of a project.

Sounds like a good fit for a student or someone who wants to break in to the software industry who is looking for product management experience.

People who use those products are best maintainers, and they know about those abandoned projects.

A person from nowhere will never became a maintainer of any serious product.

Users of the product may not know the product needs a new maintainer.

If you use a product and never caught a bug there then it might be that you don't need new version of the product? In other case you'll be looking to fix that bug / contact product owner and you will eventually know if its abandoned / needs maintainer.

I agreed to become maintainer of a project I knew nothing about.

How did that go?

Was it something you were interested in? Replaced an alternate you were working on?

I find it hard to believe that a project you didn't create became something you actively wanted to support. On top of that, if the old maintainer really walked away completely, and they don't answer questions, you're walking through the dark.

The project I'm talking about is Postgres.app. It's a GUI wrapper around a PostgreSQL server, so there wasn't a lot of code; maintaining it mainly means I need to make new binaries several times a year. I didn't need a lot of help from the previous maintainer. (But I have rewritten most of the code since I started maintaining it)

It just was a great fit; I work on a PostgreSQL client; so it seemed like a good idea to help people get a server running too.

Late reply (this has dropped to pg 6), but here's to you . Our team uses postgres.app, and I know of a number of others who do too.

From my standpoint, it is shocking that such a popular and great gateway into the PG world is in this situation. Complex, enterprisey software is now just drag-n-drop and develop. Postgres.app is really good stuff.

You don't have a donate link, but if you're selling your front-end, please promote it.

Never say never; it makes you seem very close-minded.

I really like this idea, and I'm a mid-level developer in the market to maintain a package like you've described. I would love to participate, and I'm going to watch this.

Just wanted to say thanks for making Betty[1]. It was a lot of fun using Betty a couple of years ago before the bot-hype took off.

[1] https://github.com/pickhardt/betty

You're welcome, glad you liked it!

Another earlier attempt, itself looking for a new maintainer:

http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/

The Debian equivalent:

https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

I don't understand. Ref: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=634757. This project was put up for adoption, and many people replied showing interest (even some creating PPA's) but ownership was never transferred and it is still listed for adoption.

That bug should probably be closed, because the person who published the PPA uploaded a version to Debian just a month later [1]. From the package's tracker page [2], you can see that the same person became a co-maintainer, and has been preparing most of the uploads ever since.

[1] https://tracker.debian.org/news/180171

[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/lyx

Also, https://mentors.debian.net/ has general information on how one can get started with maintaining a package from that list.

Would be useful to have a version of this for projects looking for contributors (which I suppose would align more with students and recent grads looking to beef up their experience with someone guiding them, but who don't necessarily want take on a lead role for a project)

Relatedly, I really wish Github had some sort of point system to further incentivize contributing to projects. It would also be nice to have a standardized way of marking an issue as "help wanted" rather than having to search on any of the following labels:

  help wanted
  help-wanted
  good first bug
  Help Wanted
  contribution welcome
  HelpWanted
  first time contributor
  Contributor Friendly
  Good First Task
  beginner friendly
  good first contribution
  Good for New Contributors
  pull request wanted

https://openhatch.org

Good idea, but not currently maintained!

Why do you say that?

https://github.com/openhatch/oh-mainline/graphs/contributors

But mostly because I know them (in particular paulproteus who is hard at work on sandstorm.io). It's a _great_ project that I've done some volunteer (non development) work for but would need a big infusion of money or contributors to be made useful again in 2016 as a project finder.

Same goes for OpenHatch's 'open source comes to campus' outreach program. At least many other organizations are doing substantial and scaleable work in that vein.

Not sure there's any large scale effort at building a project finder, but every small thing like Maintainers Wanted is good and helpful.

Ah, thanks. I know him as well (though the handle was unfamiliar). I was under the impression it was running under new management.

Great idea, I just opened up a PR for my project. Before this I had no idea how I was going to find a new maintainer and felt pretty guilty for moving on. Hopefully this gains some traction!

This list needs to be categorized by technologies involved in each project, such as we see at OpenHatch - https://openhatch.org/search/

Only if it gets big enough that reading through all of them is too much work. They could curate it instead.

https://helpwanted.apache.org/

Off the top of my head, this[1] is unmaintained, though in a stable-ish state.

[1]: https://github.com/yeoman/grunt-usemin

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