But do you expect many people to want to maintain a software project, but not know or care which one?
Obviously trying to contact the author or previous maintainer of an abandoned project can be difficult, but then even this wouldn't help much as they'd still need to transfer ownership to the new maintainer(s). Maybe you could offer an 'ownership escrow service' for your target audience too. That would be potentially very helpful for people that really want to wash their hands of a project.
If you use a product and never caught a bug there then it might be that you don't need new version of the product?
In other case you'll be looking to fix that bug / contact product owner and you will eventually know if its abandoned / needs maintainer.
Was it something you were interested in? Replaced an alternate you were working on?
I find it hard to believe that a project you didn't create became something you actively wanted to support. On top of that, if the old maintainer really walked away completely, and they don't answer questions, you're walking through the dark.
The project I'm talking about is Postgres.app. It's a GUI wrapper around a PostgreSQL server, so there wasn't a lot of code; maintaining it mainly means I need to make new binaries several times a year. I didn't need a lot of help from the previous maintainer. (But I have rewritten most of the code since I started maintaining it)
It just was a great fit; I work on a PostgreSQL client; so it seemed like a good idea to help people get a server running too.
Late reply (this has dropped to pg 6), but here's to you . Our team uses postgres.app, and I know of a number of others who do too.
From my standpoint, it is shocking that such a popular and great gateway into the PG world is in this situation. Complex, enterprisey software is now just drag-n-drop and develop. Postgres.app is really good stuff.
You don't have a donate link, but if you're selling your front-end, please promote it.
I really like this idea, and I'm a mid-level developer in the market to maintain a package like you've described. I would love to participate, and I'm going to watch this.
I don't understand. Ref: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=634757. This project was put up for adoption, and many people replied showing interest (even some creating PPA's) but ownership was never transferred and it is still listed for adoption.
That bug should probably be closed, because the person who published the PPA uploaded a version to Debian just a month later [1]. From the package's tracker page [2], you can see that the same person became a co-maintainer, and has been preparing most of the uploads ever since.
Would be useful to have a version of this for projects looking for contributors (which I suppose would align more with students and recent grads looking to beef up their experience with someone guiding them, but who don't necessarily want take on a lead role for a project)
Relatedly, I really wish Github had some sort of point system to further incentivize contributing to projects. It would also be nice to have a standardized way of marking an issue as "help wanted" rather than having to search on any of the following labels:
help wanted
help-wanted
good first bug
Help Wanted
contribution welcome
HelpWanted
first time contributor
Contributor Friendly
Good First Task
beginner friendly
good first contribution
Good for New Contributors
pull request wanted
But mostly because I know them (in particular paulproteus who is hard at work on sandstorm.io). It's a _great_ project that I've done some volunteer (non development) work for but would need a big infusion of money or contributors to be made useful again in 2016 as a project finder.
Same goes for OpenHatch's 'open source comes to campus' outreach program. At least many other organizations are doing substantial and scaleable work in that vein.
Not sure there's any large scale effort at building a project finder, but every small thing like Maintainers Wanted is good and helpful.
Great idea, I just opened up a PR for my project. Before this I had no idea how I was going to find a new maintainer and felt pretty guilty for moving on. Hopefully this gains some traction!
I thought it'd be useful to create a list of projects looking for new maintainers: Maintainers Wanted.
If you know of any projects that should be added, feel free to make a pull request or write an issue!