Ask HN: Maintaining projects open-sourced for previous employers
At one of my previous contracting gigs I worked for a large company and we open-sourced an iOS Swift component under the company&#x27;s Github account. The desire to open-source was coming from the team itself and we put a lot of extra effort into it at home and on the weekends.
It was a small contribution but it gained some popularity with more than 1000 stars and was featured in the Swift newsletter.<p>I finished my contract shortly after. Since then I didn&#x27;t have any access to the repository and didn&#x27;t see any updates: PR&#x27;s are left open, issues are unanswered and Swift 2.3 and 3.0 support are lacking. Forks are now in the hundreds and I suspect the main reason is the lack of maintenance.<p>I reached out to the company and offered to maintain the codebase if they can transfer ownership which they rejected citing legal concerns. They also offered to add me as a contributor so I can do some maintenance.<p>For a company this size it always looks good to have some contributions on Github and have a good reputation if they want to hire good developers. But it seems they are not serious enough about open-source since they have no structure to back it or developer time set aside to do it well.<p>What should I do now?<p>I&#x27;m not comfortable to accept the contributor role since that would mean to do the work for them while they can maintain good looks.<p>On the other hand it&#x27;s frustrating to see our work getting shelved and people struggling to use it without forking including myself.