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I've had this experience with a bunch of popular Django-related projects recently, where they stop receiving regular PR review and releases. Keeping up with Dja

by JackC 8y ago

I've had this experience with a bunch of popular Django-related projects recently, where they stop receiving regular PR review and releases. Keeping up with Django's release cycle then requires digging into the bug trackers and forks for common dependencies. It's totally understandable for that to happen, when even popular projects rely on the volunteer effort of one or two people. One model I'm curious about is https://jazzband.co/ https://jazzband.co/, "a collaborative community to share the responsibility of maintaining Python-based projects." Not sure how well that works in practice, but it would be great for something like that to crack the maintainer-burnout problem.

foo101 8y ago
I believe something like the model followed by Apache Software Foundation works well in favor of continuity of a project. They have an overseeing committee that one can request to add new committers or even transfer ownership of project if the existing committers are no longer maintaining the project. But ASF does come with a lot of bureaucracy for creating a new project. GitHub makes creating new projects very simple but it also makes disapperance of ownership very likely. If there was a way to request GitHub to transfer ownership of a popular but unmaintained project to someone else, a lot of time and effort spent in creating new forks and new project resources could be avoided.
acdha 8y ago
One thing which would help would be corporate support. The Django project itself gets some support, probably not enough, but many people forget how much of the value from Django comes from the apps rather than the core framework.
- JackC 8y ago
  Jazzband is interesting from that angle as well -- maybe encourage employees to spend some 20% time as Jazzband maintainers?
  - acdha 8y ago
    Agreed — it'd be huge if companies donated even modest amounts to ongoing work on the open-source products which power their business.

by JackC 8y ago

foo101 8y ago

I believe something like the model followed by Apache Software Foundation works well in favor of continuity of a project. They have an overseeing committee that one can request to add new committers or even transfer ownership of project if the existing committers are no longer maintaining the project. But ASF does come with a lot of bureaucracy for creating a new project. GitHub makes creating new projects very simple but it also makes disapperance of ownership very likely. If there was a way to request GitHub to transfer ownership of a popular but unmaintained project to someone else, a lot of time and effort spent in creating new forks and new project resources could be avoided.

acdha 8y ago

One thing which would help would be corporate support. The Django project itself gets some support, probably not enough, but many people forget how much of the value from Django comes from the apps rather than the core framework.

JackC 8y ago
Jazzband is interesting from that angle as well -- maybe encourage employees to spend some 20% time as Jazzband maintainers?
- acdha 8y ago
  Agreed — it'd be huge if companies donated even modest amounts to ongoing work on the open-source products which power their business.