Do you use Open Source projects that have been abandoned for years ?? 🧐
Do you guys use OSS project that its last commit was 1/2/3/4 years ago ???
I like Open Source project, but sometimes, one of the Open source projects that I love to use/contribute was abandoned for years 😅... like the last commit was on 2016/2017... last 3-4 years
What's your guy's opinions on this ?? 😁
It depends on what you mean by "use."
If the project is a library that you're relying on in something you sell, I'd consider measuring the use of updates in weeks, rather than years. There are plenty of considerations, here, though. Is it mature enough to be considered stable? Is it the sort of code that's unlikely to have security issues? Are you willing/able to fix any new problems that happen to show up? Is there enough of a user base that you can hear about any major problems? As hypothetical examples that probably won't happen any time soon, if the React or Rails communities evaporated and stopped making new releases, I wouldn't trust the existing frameworks to carry most developers for very long, since that's pretty high-stakes.
By contrast, if it's a program you use for your own purposes and there's no chance of it leaking data to someone, I see no reason to worry. Like, I have a script that generates white noise that...honestly, I don't even remember where it comes from, but I also don't care, because...what changes are they going to make that would affect my life?
i smell disaster
I maintain a fairly popular open source library (Nodemailer) and sometimes there is no changes in months or longer. Mostly because there is nothing to do - the project is “ready”.
Q: Are you a Javascript developer?
Y: If the primary developer goes on vacation or even takes too long dropping the kids off at the pool, the project is DEAD and needs to be replaced with at least two entirely new options that are more microservice-friendly.
N: Is it abandoned or is it just stable? What does Google say?
Yes I am using two that I can think of my head
Natron the by far best open source Nuke-like compositor. (https://natrongithub.github.io)
Although not fully dead the main developer has pretty much stopped working on it so there is only few minor updates now and then
Other is Accord.Net a really nifty classic ML/Image analysis and computer vision library for C# http://accord-framework.net
Again probably not completely dead but same situation main author pretty much stopped working on it.
My opinion if it works and does the job what's the problem?
I agree. Depending on the scale of the project, the decision may need to vary.
However, there are many FOSS projects that need to do one thing and they do that well without requiring later updates. I don't see issues with leveraging such projects with enough care to update for environments, architectures, etc