Small Open Source Project Viability

There is a very interesting discussion on my favorite news site, Slashdot (Link), about a developer trying to submit a fix to an open source project and not having the maintainer respond.

While this is unlikely to happen in a very vocal and active os community such as Apache or Eclipse, it still begs the question, what do you do if you are trying to help out a very niche projects. The problem basically boiled down to whether it was worth creating a new version of the project (since it is open source) so that other’s may benefit, or simply leaving it be.

I think it brings up a very good point about the viability of smaller open source projects. They are only as good as the maintainer’s are at keeping the project alive. While other developers may want to help out the project by contributing code bug fixes and features, that code is at the mercy of the particular project’s maintainer.

The answer usually is that the new developer can simply “Fork” the project and maintain it themselves. But not many of us have the time to maintain a project on our own.