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I'm the sole maintainer of a very small open source project at NASA. Despite the small codebase, I think I am still in the top ten most starred repos on github.

I'm the sole maintainer of a very small open source project at NASA. Despite the small codebase, I think I am still in the top ten most starred repos on github.com/nasa. By far the biggest problem is that we don't get any time at all to devote to maintenance. The second the NASA project I wrote the software for stopped paying for my time, the project became a personal labor of love/hate. If I ever leave NASA, I'll lose my ability to merge PRs and presumably the project will be completely abandoned despite receiving fairly regular contributions from the community. I have no particular use for the software myself, so I sporadically review and merge PRs in my spare time entirely out of a dubiously founded sense of obligation to the people who bother to submit them.

nickpeterson 4y ago
I don’t know anything about your library, but thank you for working on it.
humanrebar 4y ago
Why not encourage a friendly fork to a location that the community can maintain without a NASA employee if needed?
lawgimenez 4y ago
This is the general issue in large companies with open source projects. They don't want to devote time to maintain.
dima55 4y ago
This isn't specific to any organization. If you want this thing to keep going, you can maintain it anywhere; it's not tied to github.com/nasa in any way. I'm the sole maintainer of another open source project at NASA. I'm super stoked about it, and because of that the project will live, not because of anything NASA does. It doesn't live at github.com/nasa, which is a good thing: if I leave, I get to take it with me. Every place I've ever worked (including NASA) doesn't care about open software one way or another: if you want to release stuff and maintain it publically, you can. They don't care.
justinclift 4y ago
Can you give shared admin access to someone external? eg so this software doesn't remain being an anchor around your neck
- 0xffff2 4y ago
  Sadly that's categorically to allowed. I don't even have admin permissions on the repo, and I'm not allowed to give any permissions whatsoever to anyone outside of NASA.

nickpeterson 4y ago

I don’t know anything about your library, but thank you for working on it.

humanrebar 4y ago

Why not encourage a friendly fork to a location that the community can maintain without a NASA employee if needed?

lawgimenez 4y ago

This is the general issue in large companies with open source projects. They don't want to devote time to maintain.

dima55 4y ago

This isn't specific to any organization. If you want this thing to keep going, you can maintain it anywhere; it's not tied to github.com/nasa in any way. I'm the sole maintainer of another open source project at NASA. I'm super stoked about it, and because of that the project will live, not because of anything NASA does. It doesn't live at github.com/nasa, which is a good thing: if I leave, I get to take it with me. Every place I've ever worked (including NASA) doesn't care about open software one way or another: if you want to release stuff and maintain it publically, you can. They don't care.

justinclift 4y ago

Can you give shared admin access to someone external? eg so this software doesn't remain being an anchor around your neck

0xffff2 4y ago
Sadly that's categorically to allowed. I don't even have admin permissions on the repo, and I'm not allowed to give any permissions whatsoever to anyone outside of NASA.