Documentation

[rattrayalex]

Would it be welcome for me to open a PR for this if I am able to write docs?

[lyndsysimon]

@rattrayalex I can't imagine that it wouldn't be. Be bold!

[rattrayalex]

@lyndsysimon I would like to think so, but unfortunately while @kennethreitz is a terrific writer of software he seems perhaps stretched too thin to maintain most of his projects. PR's and issues I and others have opened on his repos have gone completely ignored. Understandable - he's not paid for his open source work, and he has a lot of it that's heavily used.

But I can't commit my time to contributing without a reasonable expectation that it'll go somewhere. It's impossible that I'd get the docs for this right the first time, so I'd need to ask for help. He'd need to correct my mistakes, and mediate the suggestions of others. Again, I'm not pointing fingers, I understand where he's coming from, but his bandwidth is the bottleneck on me contributing (here and other projects, where I would love to pitch in if I'd be supported).

[jpiper]

Alex, you've pretty much hit the nail on the head here with regards to continuing development of clint - one can't reasonably expect any sort of support from Kenneth, but I volunteered as maintainer to ensure that any major bugs are quashed and pushed to pypi (before I started maintaining even more stuff was falling by the wayside!). Any documentation that will be written will definitely end up getting pulled here as I can do this (if you're interesting in helping with being a maintainer, email Kenneth, I don't have permissions to do this).

However, I am in the midst of finishing my PhD thesis, and have just started a job as a data scientist and unfortunately don't have enough time (I'm willing to admit) to give clint at the moment - there's PRs that need some code review or have merge conflicts that I don't have the time to go through.

I'd like to think once I submit my thesis (within the next month or so) I'll be able to dedicate some of my time to fixing more of the issues here (the big one being the internal representation of strings in clint, and documentation). But at the moment the project is in a state of torpor apart from the occasional burst of "bundle all the recent bug fixes and push them to pypi".

[rattrayalex]

Wow, thanks for the response @jpiper !

I definitely have interest in joining as a maintainer (here or elsewhere) if possible but would need to prove myself first. I'll try to take a crack at docs (and perhaps other things) soon in the hopes that ~5 weeks out you'll be able to take a look at them.

Good luck with your thesis & congrats on the job!

[howardroark]

It's a bit of a shame, I see this happen to countless quality projects. Psychologically people seek to work with the original source of an idea rather than a fork. The problem is that without active leadership things eventually fizzle out and stop keeping up with the trends.

It is also difficult for the creator to just give the project away because it does have economic and social advantages to keep against their name.

I'd love to see a trend of shops buying the rights to projects like this. Everyone is always searching for quality talent and having an active open source project against your name can do a lot for that goal. I mean think how much companies spend to market themselves as sponsors of conferences.

I bet a shop here in Toronto could be convinced to pay 5k+ to get a hold of something like this. The creator gets paid, and a business gets more eyes. Plus they have a financial incentive to be really active in leading it. No doubt that they would also big-up where it came from as well... That's marketing 101.

I wonder if you could just build a service that monitored GitHub for projects that look neglected and broker the sales of them, haha. On Sep 13, 2014 5:00 AM, "Alex Rattray" notifications@github.com wrote:

Wow, thanks for the response @jpiper https://github.com/jpiper !

I definitely have interest in joining as a maintainer (here or elsewhere) if possible but would need to prove myself first. I'll try to take a crack at docs (and perhaps other things) soon in the hopes that ~5 weeks out you'll be able to take a look at them.

Good luck with your thesis & congrats on the job!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/kennethreitz/clint/issues/15#issuecomment-55486103.

[rattrayalex]

Interesting thoughts. Not sure money would need to change hands for the basic idea to work. Would be cool to see more dev shops taking over projects. OTOH, would also be cool to see, for example, companies like Heroku pay Kenneth - or even other Python devs - to work on open source full-time.

I'm sure they let him spend some work time on contributing, of course. But it'd be nice if Heroku was committed to the success of open source produced by its employees, even to the point of providing other company resources to that end.

[howardroark]

Heroku paying Kenneth is an excellent idea... if they could see it right. Large projects will increasingly be an assembly of open-source projects that follow the UNIX philosophy well. The "black box" will really just be the way in which you wire it together. Kenneth seems like a visionary type guy and could lead Heroku to be able to market themselves as 100% open-source. Getting quality developer attention is your ticket to success in this market (IMO).

I got the idea of shops taking over projects when reading an article by @visionmedia who handed the keys of his popular express.js project to the company @strongloop. Seems like there was a lot community fuss at the time, but in the end it looks to be going just fine. I'm not saying it HAS to be about money, but we live in a supply & demand economy. If it makes economic sense for organizations to be visible in open-source... a value system for projects will inevitably arrive. Take the money or leave it really...

Here is the article... https://medium.com/code-adventures/strongloop-express-40b8bcb8e5af

[redknitin]

This is quite an interesting discussion and I just had to add my comment as well. I've had to abandon some of the projects that I worked on, and just having them continue to get feature additions and support for issues by a commercial entity would have been ideal. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to locate such organizations but if we could, it would turn into something pretty big considering the number of projects today that are in need of such backing.

[lyndsysimon]

Honestly, this is starting to sound like a project in its own right. Perhaps someone would want to pick it up and turn it into a webapp?

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Nitin notifications@github.com wrote:

This is quite an interesting discussion and I just had to add my comment as well. I've had to abandon some of the projects that I worked on, and just having them continue to get feature additions and support for issues by a commercial entity would have been ideal. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to locate such organizations but if we could, it would turn into something pretty big considering the number of projects today that are in need of such backing.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/kennethreitz/clint/issues/15#issuecomment-56637363

[howardroark]

Totally! Effectively you could design a solid JSON schema meant to house a "project up for relocation". Use the GitHub API and OAUTH to ensure that the only projects available were put there by the owners. Throw it all into MongoDB and use the project eve to serve it all up. Then design a clever process to handle the job of "courting" the owner. Build all the UI and workflows in JS and host the front-end code with Jekyll and GitHub pages (That way a larger group of developers could contribute to the user interface without having to wrangle the ops of Python)

BAM! I'm just better at coming up with the ideas than making them...

I do sense that a growing amount of people out there are becoming frustrated with under managed packages that they use in their projects.