[Project_owners] Project takeover request

[Charles Melhorn]

> As a reminder, if anyone else is interested in taking over a project on
> the abandoned list, please email that person and ask for permission. 
> If that person doesn't respond within a reasonable amount of time, we
> will assume that the project is no longer being maintained and may hand
> it over to a new project owner.
>   

As the owner of the "abandoned" project in question, I'd like to make a 
few comments:

1. I don't consider two hours a reasonable amount of time for responding 
to requests to transfer ownership of a project. I received an initial 
inquiry from the prospective new owner this morning, and two and a half 
hours later, I was informed that ownership of my project was being 
transferred. David was good about quickly halting this process once I 
replied, but by that time, extensive changes to the project web pages, 
source repository, and bugzilla had already been made. (David, if you 
could wave your administrator's wand and undo all those changes in one 
fell swoop, I'd appreciate it!).

Whatever the policy regarding abandoned projects turns out to be, 
Mozdev.org staff should attempt to contact the project owner *before* 
initiating a transfer of ownership and allow a reasonable amount of 
time, on the order of days not hours, for a reply.

2. On several occasions, impatient users have "updated" my extensions by 
bumping the version number to make them nominally compatible with a new 
release of Firefox, and then distributed the modified package without 
proper testing. Subsequently, I began to receive problem reports about 
the extension interfering with the browser operation, conflicts with 
other extensions, poor uninstall behavior, etc.. Before I release a new 
version of an extension, I attempt to test it thoroughly, and as my time 
is limited, that means I generally don't make releases frequently.

I realize this is frustrating. However, like all projects hosted here, 
the source code is released under an open source license. That means 
that if you're unhappy with the pace of development, you're welcome to 
use the existing code to create your own extension, subject to the 
restrictions of the license.

Regards,

Charles