I’ve said this a few times on the c-ares mailing list, but I guess that just doesn’t reach very many people outside the very closest “family” so I decided I’d mention a blurb here. (I don’t think this reaches very many people either, but quite possibly at least a few others…)

Background

A couple of years ago, I wanted to introduce asynchronous name resolving to libcurl to better allow many simultaneous requests still being single-threaded. This venture started with me and Bjorn Reese starting the Denise project that would do exactly this. We found no proper existing alternatives with a suitable license so we started our own.

Then someone mentioned that ares is almost exactly what Denise was meant to become and it had a fine license. I immediately jumped the Denise idea and went with ares. Soon enough we found out that ares needed improvements and tweaks, and its original author didn’t seem interested in incorporation those into ares… so I created a fork named c-ares.

c-ares has since then been used by libcurl and it has been bug-fixed and improved by a bunch of skilled hackers and it works solidly and reliably. It has also been discovered and incorporated into a bunch of other softwares, including UnreadlIRCd, BZFlag, Hobbit network monitor, libevnet, Tor, gLite, aria2, sipsak, Second Life and more…

Today

I don’t normally work with any of my open source projects in my full-time job, so I need to distribute my spare time on the various projects. When my spare time gets limited, I need to cut down on the projects that I deem is least interesting or perhaps least in need of attention (from me). Recently, it has been obvious that c-ares is one of them projects that I rarely have time and energy left for at the end of the day.

Caretaker

I have no plans to “jump ship” or to abandon the project in any way, but I think it would be beneficial for the c-ares project if someone would step forward and if not “take over” the project, at least join in and help share the burden with patch applying, source code reviewing, do design decisions, reply to mailing list questions etc.

There’s no crisis, there’s no hurry, but the project won’t move forward very fast as the situation currently is.

Many (if not most – at least if we count every single project we can find) open source projects are mostly and primarily developed by volunteers on their spare time.

The volunteers may be professional developers, students, chefs or plumbers. When they work on their particular pet peeves they do that on time that would otherwise be spent with their family, with friends, sleeping, baking cakes, collecting stamps or similar.

However, when this team of volunteers (which usually is a very small team in most projects, in fact most projects start with just a single guy or perhaps two in the developer team) is successful in producing a project or a tool that finds a larger audience something happens.

When more and more professionals out there start using this tool, when companies start to embed and integrate this product into their projects and start to rely on it for business and day to day routines, not only do the guys in the open source project get more patches, bug reports and quite possibly more volunteers joining the project, something else can happen:

Suddenly, the developer team may notice, most of the people that ask questions, have problems, report bugs, post patches are people that are getting paid while doing it! The project has gotten so popular many companies use it and ordinary employees are set to use it as part of their day time job. They get paid to use it, to fix it, to install it and to customize it.

The developer team – however – is still consisting of volunteering spare time hacking individuals who do this without any monetary compensation…

Of course, if the projects grow wildly popular they’re likely to be bought by a company and the dev team or at least a guy or two are likely to be hired by a company to do what he/they were doing, but successful open source projects aren’t really that attractive to companies to buy since they (the companies) can instead just collaborate a bit on the side and just use the software fine without having to buy it and without having to employ anyone from there.

Please note that whatever parallels to existing projects I may or may not be part of that you can find or imagine here, I’m not whining and I’m not complaining! This is just me taking notice of what I believe is an interesting paradox happening to some open source projects.