OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
Property law (at least, as taught to me by Elizabeth Scott) seeks to have owned property utilized at its highest value use. Thus, according to the basics of property law, raw land has the lowest value, since its the least utilized in comparison to houses, factories, etc.
The same can be said for all sorts of things Internet. One example is parked domains. According to Domain Tools, there are 71,083,043 registered domains, but 217,385,494 deleted domains. While there is value in appreciation, particularly of the potentially higher demand sites–the example of sex.com comes to mind–many sites are simply either parked or have become link farms. However, as a property rights advocate, I believe that if someone has paid a fair value for a piece of property, be it land or internet domains, then that person has the right to do with that property what they want.
This does not extend to dead projects, though. There are currently 153,954 projects registered on
SourceForge, and a long tail truly exists for these. Take the 950th most popular project, the Jedi Code Library. It averages about 100 hits a day. This is for a project that is in the top .5%ile of the existing projects on SourceForge.
While a project like Jedi Code Library certainly is still fulfilling a need, there are many, many projects down the charts which are either no longer serving the needs of the users or, more likely, never fulfilled those needs. Keeping them on the SourceForge servers is certainly fine (I do not deign to recommend to the SourceForge team what they should do with their disk space), for projects that have become overcome by events, the owners should consider winding down the project. This will serve two purposes. It allows the better, or more relevant projects, to rise to the top, get more viewership, and, therefore, serve the community better. Secondly, it allows the developers who are on the team still piecing together the code to keep it running long past its expiration date to free up valuable time to work on other, potentially more useful projects.
The projects are not property, per se, but the time of the developers is a valuable resource. Tie up projects which have served their useful life and put them in a state where patches will no longer be applied. Refocus developers who are donating their time to projects where the hours can have a great impact. Sometimes houses need to be razed so that newer, more livable houses can be built. The same can be done with projects which have run their useful lives, where the hours spent have passed the point of diminishing returns.