At the University of Pretoria we had two teams develop the same project - the one using a waterfall based development method and the other using Scrum as an agile development process. The project was to add client based secure group chat functionality to the Linphone chat application without making any changes to the server -- i.e. the server did not have any group chat functionality itself. The result was interesting. The waterfall team committed more thought into the software architecture and came up with a distributed architecture without a single point of failure - even if the group creator./owner went off-line, the remaining group members could still continue with the group chat. In the Scrum based project all communication for a group went via the group owner node and hence there was a single point of failure. On the other hand, the Scrum based project came up with a more intuitive and more usable user interface for the application, most probably due to the short client feedback cycles.

I know a couple where the husband wanted to write a software system but could not get the go-ahead from his employer to do it. He then used his honeymoon leave to write the system (sending his wife on honeymoon), wrote the system, resigned and sold the system to his ex employer. They are happily married (20 odd years later).I know a couple where the husband wanted to write a software system but could not get the go-ahead from his employer to do it. He then used his honeymoon leave to write the system (sending his wife on honeymoon), wrote the system, resigned and sold the system to his ex employer. They are happily married (20 odd years later).

This post just emphasises again that we need engineering standards and measures for software.

I also prefer PostgreSQL, but clearly you have a lot more oportunities to fix things on MySQL :)

Red Hat -> Suse -> Gentoo -> Arch -> Gentoo

Or you can start with a clean desktop and not have to remove anything. Try XMonad :)

Until you either open-source it or until you have enabled the organization to maintain the software by themselves :)

"That's one of the reasons they like Windows and OS X (all the fighting over those is kept behind the scenes, for the most part)." That's one of the differences between open and not open. Looks to me a bit like wanting a non-opensource Linux. Mac is close to that (shackles and all).

Unlike non-profit organizations which are generally accountable to society or a subset thereof, companies are only accountable to shareholders. If the choice is between "do good" and "increase shareholder value" they are obliged to follow the latter. "Do good" acts are tus only done if they are aligned with optimizing shareholder value. This holds for any corporate and I do not like it if certain corporates (e.g. Google) try and create a perception that they are a "do no evil company". It is only that that image can provide a lot of shareholder value, but trust -- NOOOOOO

Try XMonad on Gentoo or Arch :)

Except by pointing out general places where orphaned OSS projects can be advertized for adoption :)

If the poster had given the name, the focus might have been on how to safe that particular project whilst the question is more general (and more important). What infrastructure has open source got in place to safe abandoned software projects in general?

It is not that mis-leading ... They did say the horns most probably evolved as a form of sexual display!!

Or not use KDE at all, sticking with XFCE or XMonad or any of the other lightweight window managers.

What I love is that this is the main if not only concrete enhancement listed in the BBC article.