Abandoned Project Inquiry

Hi there - I'm new ZenCart and OpenSource code - I love this product and the cool add-ins that are mostly for free. I've been spending a lot of time configuring and adding third-party add-ons to ZenCart in order to customize for ecommerce site before going live.

I have a question - if a project (which I would like not to mention yet) appears to be abandoned and no support actions since 2007 as well as no response from the author. Can someone like me take that project and update to current standards but also ask for donations for the time put into it? I ask this but I found an application that needs a lot of work and I am working with an outside consulting company to fix it. I would like to rebrand it with a new updated name and put it up on the ZenCart Free Software area. Again, since I am investing my time and money to upgrade it - just wanted to know if I could ask for donations to help recoup my costs for a VERY valuable application.

Thanks - Jeff

Yes. You can take it over and you can ask for donations. Don't expect to get many - more likely and valuable might be paid work to further customise or install it for specific stores.

If it's GPL.

(what you are allowed to do with it depends on the licence (and laws of course), you are talking about open source, but that does not say anything about the licence)

Paulm raises some good points. I assumed that you were referring to an existing Zen Cart mod. But if you were actually discussing an external project that you planned to integrate into Zen Cart as an add-on mod, then it would depend on the compatibility of the licenses.

There are also specific standards for donation requests for modules in the Free Software Add Ons area.

YOU MAY include a request for donations in the readme file.
YOU MAY NOT include a donation link in your application's admin panel.

It also depends upon the difference between a full "project" and an "add-on" written for a project.

Any add-ons written for an Open Source Project are themselves Open Source - but this does not prevent you from asking for a donation towards your updated version of it.

A full "project" may also be reassigned if it is judged to be moribund - meaning no support for it for 6 months or more and no updates/releases to source code.

Our company wanted to update and use a piece of Mailing List Software which had been released under GPL, but which had belonged to a project which was acknowledged publically to be dead. The upgrade involved was a major piece of work, but we did manage to contact the former head of that project and received his permission to bundle it with our commercial product provided that we left acknowledgements intact - which we did.

Vger

So, what is the official process to determine that a piece software abandonded? When it is considered abandoned what happens to the copywrites and GNU? I want overhaul it to make it completly functional as this piece of software really never made it to prime time and rebrand it. It can't function in the condition it is in anyway - the code is so outdated the functionality doesn't meet current specifications of the receiver.

If it is GPL you do not need the previous copyright holder's permission, you just have to acknowledge where the code came from.

Basically leave the existing copyright statements intact (i.e. extend them) or if you're making extensive changes look at how the Zen Cart headers reference osCommerce.

If the project is licensed under the GPL (you haven't said) it doesn't matter whether it's dead or not, you can release your own fork - but you should consider changing the name unless you have the original owners permission to use it.

I am starting to get curious which project you are talking about :wink: