Raj is a product manager at InterSystems focused on developer experience. He pioneered Web mapping-as-a-service in the late 1990s with Syncline, a startup he co-founded. After that he finished his PhD in Information Systems for Planning at MIT, creating a distributed computing architecture for urban information systems based on web services design patterns.
He then worked for a decade on spatial data interoperability challenges with the Open Geospatial Consortium helping governments work with software companies to share and manage geographic information for natural resource management, disaster relief, and defense coordination.
Prior to joining InterSystems, Raj worked in developer relations for database and data science cloud offerings at IBM.
Great discussion topic!
As you say, ISC will not take over orphaned packages. Not only because of the time commitment, but also because the spirit of OpenExchange is to promote developer-to-developer initiatives. If a package has fallen dormant and no one else wants to fork it and maintain it, then that's a signal it isn't worth maintaining. The open source equivalent of Darwin's "survival of the fittest".
For me the big question is, how to make these orphans disappear into the darker recesses of OpenExchange so that a casual user doesn't find them easily, have a bad experience, and get a bad impression of OpenExchange in general. What if we had some algorithm for defining "orphan", such as, a repo that has not been modified in over 24 months, or has not been modified in over 6 months and also has outstanding pull requests with no comments on them. Using this algorithm we could annotate every OE entry with it's "active" state and filter out orphans from the site by default, but allow users to see orphans by explicitly turning off that filter.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
That's great news @John Murray! Thanks for helping make this happen.