Another rant about the dangers of software rotting away if it (<i>gasp</i>) hasn't been updated within six months. It appears people are <i>really</i> bad at assessing maturity of software, so they choose cheap metrics (like # of commits / last commit), rather than examining the actual quality of the code and design.<p>Eventually some smaller open source projects achieve feature-completeness and no longer need any more features. It is healthy for them to declare themselves done. This is distinctly different from maintainer apathy, though the symptoms may be similar.
Does anyone know of healthy open source projects that need people? I'm a fresh college grad and looking to sharpen my skills in my spare time - I like javascript and java, and wouldn't mind the opportunity to get better at python/ruby etc.
This is very true and also the reason that you can't just dump a bag of cash onto an OSS project and expect it to fare batter: Open Source projects run on time, not money. The only way to give it more time is to have more devs that are willing to commit their free time to it.<p>This is not to say you shouldn't give money to OSS projects. You should definitely support your favourite programs even if its just $5 a year for a single one you used that year.
"They purposefully design technology to break after a few years, so that you have to buy more of it."<p>[citation needed]<p>Seriously - I'm not denying that an awful lot of things break pretty quickly, but it seems far more likely that this is cost-cutting leading to questionable reliability, not outright "we're going to put a 1-day-after-warranty self-destruct in this toaster!".<p>Besides, advertising to convince people that their not-broken thing needs to be replaced with NEW-SHINY-THING seems much more effective - and less likely to piss people off.
Have you heard of Facebook Open Academy [1]? It's an initiative to get students more involved in Open Source.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/facebook-open-academy-bringing-open-source-to-cs-curricula/10151806121378920" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/facebook...</a>