[Project_owners] Project takeover request

[George A. Booth]

David Boswell wrote:
>
> I certainly think this is important.  Right now the abandoned projects
> list is a mix of legitimate projects with code that are no longer
> active and a bunch of projects that were set up and never touched. 
> This is one of the motivations for revamping our project activity lists
> and that should be rolled out soon.
>

As the beneficiary of a project reassignment:

My motivation was to provide the updates and fixes I had done publicly, 
and to have my name attached. I wanted to honor the original author's 
work by clearly only extending it, rather than start a new project which 
didn't back reference its foundation.

I would have waited longer than the week or two for the project-owner's 
reply had there been a clear rule on the matter. I didn't want an 
undefined wait to become an interminable one.

I would have been happy with a fork - if traffic to the abandoned 
project would have been directed to my project. Perhaps mozdev could 
provide a separate header for such projects? In fact, I'll accept that 
as a retroactive change, should it be implemented.

Even with the change, Firefox Add-ons - the foremost ( in front of 
everybody else, not best ) extension repository - refused me any access 
to their parallel project. In fact, the person I corresponded with 
didn't know who David Boswell was. Just FYI.

The project I adopted, Rimwheel, didn't have any licence declaration, 
GPL, MPL, copyleft, standard copyright, nothing. While the policy of 
mozdev is that all posted code is open source, mozdev doesn't actually 
have the power to decide such a thing for authors. The mozdev's 
enforcement extends only as far as the ugly option of removing projects 
that don't comply. At the least, mozdev could give notice that the 
project isn't open source until the copyright specifics are posted.

Finally, thank you mozdev for posting my code under any circumstances at 
all. You already do a great job and great service.