The Conservatory

Sometimes open source code drops off the Net, never to be seen in public again.

Other times, it is published only as a series of release snapshots, with no publicly-accessible version control repository.

The Conservatory exists to address both situations.

Welcome to the Conservatory:

github.com/Conservatory

The Conservatory is an archive for open source and public domain code that doesn't have any other clear canonical version-controlled home on the public Internet. It's a place to preserve a convenient version history for code whose authors

1. Don't keep it under public version control, or...

2. Have abandoned it, neglecting even to keep a copy on a public server, or even...

3. Have actively tried to remove it from the Net, open source license notwithstanding.

You might think that (3) never happens, but actually an instance of it was part of what motivated the creation of the Conservatory... and then it happened again.

The Conservatory is strictly about preservation and ease of revival. The presence of a repository in the Conservatory is not a criticism of that code's authors or former maintainers. No one is obligated to maintain a public repository of anything, unless they've signed a contract to do so, in which case their obligation is to the contractual counterparty not to the public at large.

Update 2019-11-14: Software Heritage and the GitHub Archive Program do something similar to this, but it's not clear whether ease of revival is as high a priority for them as it is for us.

The Conservatory is archival. Repositories here do not take pull requests because they are not meant to be the "social master" repository of their respective projects. If you want to work on one of the codebases, please fork it to a new repository and work on it there. If the code still has an upstream maintainer, you can work out with her what relationship your fork should have to her upstream releases. If there is no upstream maintainer, then maybe your fork will catch on and become the new master — and the Conservatory's copy will become less and less important (as well as increasingly out-of-date), which is fine.

How to put code in the Conservatory.

First make absolutely sure it's licensed under an open source license or is in the public domain, and make sure you've got a copy of the code yourself (don't count on it staying wherever on the Net you found it — if it disappeared from other places it could disappear from there too). If there are multiple release packages available, please preserve all of them.

Then file an issue against this repository with details.

We can take it from there. However, if you want to save us some time, you can use the conservatory-import script to assemble all the upstream releases into a git repository, and then put that repository somewhere where we can clone it.

Why is the Conservatory on GitHub?

GitHub offers unlimited zero-cost repository hosting for public source code, is reassuringly large and stable — after all, this is an archive, so the whole point is for it to stick around — and most open source developers know how to work with it (for example, they know how to fork a repository in order to start working on its code). We encourage people to mirror Conservatory repositories wherever they want; our main criteria in choosing GitHub were stability and familiarity.

Who runs the Conservatory?

The Conservatory was started by kfogel, partially in response to this thread, and he reviews submissions, getting help when needed. A few other people have admin access, to help us avoid a low bus factor. We may expand and formalize things depending on the rate of submissions.

Thanks to Felicia Doolin for the logo design.