Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.

• Flip side
  2004-05-18 12:49:40  brian d foy | [View]
  
  
  I have helped transfer a few dead projects to other people through SourceForge, and I do this several times a year as a Perl Authors Upload SErver (PAUSE, the gateway to CPAN) admin.
  
  No matter how old code gets, it does whatever it did, and keeps doing so.

• Flip side
  2004-05-18 11:01:59  chromatic | [View]
  
  

  It happens occasionally. Consider, though, that many dead projects on SF don't have any code at all!

  
  
  

  Jono's absolutely right; it's a mistake to think that a little project will run like a really big, successful project. It may, in the future, but it won't happen all at once.

• Flip side
  2004-05-18 09:36:41  dscotson [View]
  
  
  Recently there is the Wordpress project (getting a lot of buzz, especially after Moveable Types recent PR missteps) that was born out of the ashes of b2/cafelog.
  
  http://photomatt.net/archives/2003/05/26/wordpress-now-available/
  
  You can check out the activity stats here (note that people were still coming to see the site (red) but stopped downloading things (blue):
  
  http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=51422

• Flip side
  2004-05-18 08:11:17  jwenting [View]
  
  
  Nice in theory but highly unlikely in practice.
  
  Everyone likes to write new fresh code, not regurgitate old dead code by others.
  That's why there's a gazillion projects all doing basically the same thing in slightly different ways.
  
  If you have the choice to start a new project, join an existing project that's actively maintained and does almost what you want, or adopt some dead codebase that noone's touched in 2 years, which would you do?
  Remember people will look at the sf pages for the dead project and see it's been dead for 2 years until someone picked it up again.
  They'll likely decide to watch and see what happens before jumping on, leaving you to muddle on alone.
  And that's IF you can get in contact with the original maintainer to get the administrator's password for the project so you can add yourself as a committer and administrator when that person has likely changed email addresses several times or if you're lucky just forgotten they ever started that project.