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How to not abondon a project? I would love to know that.

This is my naive understanding. A for profit company open sources a project that they have been using and developing internally. The have built a philosophy and understanding of the project as they use and develop it. Most of their action regarding the project is that they must use it and they usually don't have any other options.

Because the foundation is already laid the solution for its shortcoming is having just an understanding of them. Then you open source the project knowing that you have developed the project to it's completion.

Now comes the OSS community. Either we request features that goes against the project philosophy or we don't want to get involved because we don't need to compromise and acknowledge the shortcomings because we have options.

A good solution can be open sourcing projects that the org thinks isn't complete and needs further development without compromising security, philosophy and usability. Because if you have a list of things you need, you can ask the OSS community to fix those things rather then be critical of the foundation and philosophy.




I like your post. It raises practical issues.

Idea for projects not owned by mega-corps (half real, half fantasy):

1. Get the project added as a package to one or more major commercial Linux distros, e.g., RedHat, etc.

2. Grant commit access to one or more devs at the same Linux vendor. Allow them to do whatever they want. You might not like their direction, but it should survive.

3. Retire from the project whenever you like.

4. Also, you could post a note in README about retiring. If people want to add features, ask them to fork, or just grant them commit access and let them go wild.




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