4 ms·

Do you know of an example of someone taking someone else's unfinished project and running with it? (And just to be clear, I'm not trolling -- I'm actually aski

Do you know of an example of someone taking someone else's unfinished project and running with it? (And just to be clear, I'm not trolling -- I'm actually asking.)

ericflo 15y ago
The Cassandra project was in really bad shape when FB open sourced it, and it languished like that for several months before Jonathan Ellis picked it up and ran with it. Now it's a thriving Apache project, with contributors from many companies, and even commercial support through DataStax.
tikhonj 15y ago
Yeah. My favorite example is JS-2 mode[1]. It's a brilliant mode for editing JavaScript released by Steve Yegge. However, it had some shortcomings and (minor) bugs; Yegge did not have time to support it any more. [1]: http://code.google.com/p/js2-mode/ http://code.google.com/p/js2-mode/ Then somebody cloned it on GitHub[2], changed the indentation, fixed some bugs and added some features. In the past, using JS-2 mode was a bit of a compromise--intelligence at the cost of weird behavior. Now there is no compromise at all. [2]: https://github.com/mooz/js2-mode https://github.com/mooz/js2-mode
FigBug 15y ago
Miranda IM (nee Miranda ICQ) didn't become usable or popular until after I gave up on it. I think it's been abandoned at least once again. Several complete different sets of people have been working on it.
albertzeyer 15y ago
There was a similar discussion a while ago: [Shutting down a project? Open Source it.](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3712411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3712411) Do you also count partly finished projects? I listed some projects [here](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713240 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713240). Most of them were extended/improved a lot, e.g. by porting them to other platforms, etc.
benackles 15y ago
WordPress was an abandoned open source project called B2, before it was forked and became the juggernaut it is today.
fuzzix 15y ago
The work done on the Perl SDL bindings of late has been sterling - it had been stagnating for quite a while, AFAIK.
wjbr 15y ago
http://hackety.com/ http://hackety.com/

Do you know of an example of someone taking someone else's unfinished project and running with it? (And just to be clear, I'm not trolling -- I'm actually asking.)

ericflo 15y ago

The Cassandra project was in really bad shape when FB open sourced it, and it languished like that for several months before Jonathan Ellis picked it up and ran with it. Now it's a thriving Apache project, with contributors from many companies, and even commercial support through DataStax.

tikhonj 15y ago

Yeah. My favorite example is JS-2 mode[1]. It's a brilliant mode for editing JavaScript released by Steve Yegge. However, it had some shortcomings and (minor) bugs; Yegge did not have time to support it any more. [1]: http://code.google.com/p/js2-mode/ http://code.google.com/p/js2-mode/ Then somebody cloned it on GitHub[2], changed the indentation, fixed some bugs and added some features. In the past, using JS-2 mode was a bit of a compromise--intelligence at the cost of weird behavior. Now there is no compromise at all. [2]: https://github.com/mooz/js2-mode https://github.com/mooz/js2-mode

FigBug 15y ago

Miranda IM (nee Miranda ICQ) didn't become usable or popular until after I gave up on it. I think it's been abandoned at least once again. Several complete different sets of people have been working on it.

albertzeyer 15y ago

There was a similar discussion a while ago: [Shutting down a project? Open Source it.](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3712411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3712411) Do you also count partly finished projects? I listed some projects [here](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713240 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713240). Most of them were extended/improved a lot, e.g. by porting them to other platforms, etc.

benackles 15y ago

WordPress was an abandoned open source project called B2, before it was forked and became the juggernaut it is today.

fuzzix 15y ago

The work done on the Perl SDL bindings of late has been sterling - it had been stagnating for quite a while, AFAIK.

wjbr 15y ago

http://hackety.com/ http://hackety.com/