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What will happen to all these abandoned plugins?


  • deadlyhifi
    Participant

    @tomdebruin

    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?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • 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 :)


    _ck_
    Participant

    @_ck_

    Only people that have rushed to the new version are in limbo.

    1.0 has been out only a whole week now.

    The alpha/RC phases didn’t help as more was changed afterwards.

    One only has to study what happened to WordPress during it’s growing pains to see what will happen to bbPress.

    GPL means you can republish the plugin, ie. post a link to a new download with your fixes. Taking over for an author within the extend section itself is another matter however and is best done with permission from the original author. Then someone like Sam can add you to the SVN. Rarely is it impossible to reach an author – they may leave bbpress but unlikely the entire internet.

    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!


    deadlyhifi
    Participant

    @tomdebruin

    You should definitely submit your patches in the comments of the plugin pages, if you’re willing!

    Indeed I have:

    https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/approve-user-registration/page/2/#post-3902

    and

    https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbpress-moderation-suite/page/2/#post-3963

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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