What will happen to all these abandoned plugins?
-
There appear to be quite a few plugins that have been abandoned by their developer.
Under open source is it allowed to take over the development of someone else’s plugin, and then resubmit it (obviously crediting the original author)?
Perhaps all the current plugins should be thrown into some kind of code vault for people to use, and actively developed plugins be resubmitted?
I’ve just fixed two plugins to work with V1.0 but have no way of knowing if their original authors are planning on updating them at any point. I’d want to do more work on them if I was going to resubmit them, but I’m not sure whether to wait a bit to see if the original developer decides to do anything with them.
I know _ck_ is holding off a little bit for bbP to get more established before making fixes (which is fair enough). Have we just entered a stage of limbo?
-
If WordPress is any indication, people just spin-off the abandoned plugins and make newly named ones with credit given. A branch, if you will.
Go ahead and submit them as ‘new’, but be a mench and credit where it’s due
I sometimes see plugins patched by people other than the original developer… usually they just upload the patch to a private server or to pastebin, and then submit a link to the path on the plugin comments page. The original author then often releases a patched version using the code fixes.
If the plugin is completely abandoned, there have been cases where a new developer has taken things over. Those situations are pretty rare though…
You should definitely submit your patches in the comments of the plugin pages, if you’re willing!
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
