<story><title>NASA and Open-Source Software</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/923223/6f3f371c8267eff2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>0xffff2</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m the sole maintainer of a very small open source project at NASA. Despite the small codebase, I think I am still in the top ten most starred repos on github.com&amp;#x2F;nasa.&lt;p&gt;By far the biggest problem is that we don&amp;#x27;t get any time at all to devote to maintenance. The second the NASA project I wrote the software for stopped paying for my time, the project became a personal labor of love&amp;#x2F;hate. If I ever leave NASA, I&amp;#x27;ll lose my ability to merge PRs and presumably the project will be completely abandoned despite receiving fairly regular contributions from the community. I have no particular use for the software myself, so I sporadically review and merge PRs in my spare time entirely out of a dubiously founded sense of obligation to the people who bother to submit them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dima55</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t specific to any organization. If you want this thing to keep going, you can maintain it anywhere; it&amp;#x27;s not tied to github.com&amp;#x2F;nasa in any way.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m the sole maintainer of another open source project at NASA. I&amp;#x27;m super stoked about it, and because of that the project will live, not because of anything NASA does. It doesn&amp;#x27;t live at github.com&amp;#x2F;nasa, which is a good thing: if I leave, I get to take it with me. Every place I&amp;#x27;ve ever worked (including NASA) doesn&amp;#x27;t care about open software one way or another: if you want to release stuff and maintain it publically, you can. They don&amp;#x27;t care.</text></comment>
<story><title>NASA and Open-Source Software</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/923223/6f3f371c8267eff2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>0xffff2</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m the sole maintainer of a very small open source project at NASA. Despite the small codebase, I think I am still in the top ten most starred repos on github.com&amp;#x2F;nasa.&lt;p&gt;By far the biggest problem is that we don&amp;#x27;t get any time at all to devote to maintenance. The second the NASA project I wrote the software for stopped paying for my time, the project became a personal labor of love&amp;#x2F;hate. If I ever leave NASA, I&amp;#x27;ll lose my ability to merge PRs and presumably the project will be completely abandoned despite receiving fairly regular contributions from the community. I have no particular use for the software myself, so I sporadically review and merge PRs in my spare time entirely out of a dubiously founded sense of obligation to the people who bother to submit them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lawgimenez</author><text>This is the general issue in large companies with open source projects. They don&amp;#x27;t want to devote time to maintain.</text></comment>