Abandoned open hardware projects

Earlier today I posted on the blog about our policies on open hardware. One thing I wanted to open to the community is a gray area on open hardware - abandoned projects.

There are projects on Tindie with tens to hundreds of people on the waiting list. However when the seller no longer replies, we are creating a poor customer experience. There is community demand and yet no one to bring a project back to life.

While respecting the original licenses and attribution, we’d like to figure out a way for connecting these projects with Tindarians.

What do you all think?

We’ve been discussing this on IRC - just making sure that convo is in this thread-

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After you figure out what is considered an abandon project and someone takes on that project. What if there was a link created between the two projects?

The original project would say something like “this project has been abandon” and here is a link to project that has create a clone or replacement.

Then on the new project there would be a link for attribution to the original project.

I think if the seller remains unresponsive you could potentially put out a bug to a list of “interested” sellers to see if they feel like replicating the project to sell at the same price and then update buyers with links to alternatives? Maybe drop the links on the original page…

@lowvoltagelabs great idea +1

@chasxmd yep exactly