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Ask HN: How to give away a popular(ish) codebase?

4 points by hacknat ↗ HN
I developed a project for NodeJS a few years ago that has gotten quite popular since then, and is something that I know a lot of businesses and individuals use. Last I checked it's getting 5k+ downloads/month (that obviously doesn't mean 5k new people per month). It's a binding to a C++ library and I worked out most of the bugs last year.

The thing that sucks? V8 has changed considerable, as has NodeJS's api. I'm getting tickets to keep up, but I just don't have any motive to do the work (I've moved on to golang). I've stopped caring about Node, as I actually think it's not that great of a platform anymore. I think it's useful for small, one-off things, but I'm not really interested in developing with it anymore. Any suggestions for getting rid of this thing in a way that's fair to the people who are relying on it for their organization?

3 comments

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detaro
Do you have any major contributors that might be willing to take over? Other than that, publicly declare that you intend to not continue work on it and are looking for someone to take over. You'll probably need some time to transfer it to make sure you give it to an appropriate person.

> fair to the people who are relying on it for their organization?

If there are large-ish organisations that need it, they could take it over or pay you for further development if you are interested in doing that.

Avalaxy
> in a way that's fair to the people who are relying on it for their organization?

It's nice of you to think about them, but you don't owe them anything. They didn't pay you for your work. Every developer must understand that if they choose to use a free framework that is being maintained by only 1 developer, they're putting themselves at risk of the framework being discontinued.

davismwfl
Well, if you want to pass it off I would be interested in at least taking a look at it and seeing if it is something we want to take on. Our focus is node and C++ with a little golang, but probably 90% is C++ and node. Hell for all I know it could be a package we are using. If you want to share privately which package it is my contact is in my profile.