Ask HN: Took over an abandoned library. How do I get people to use the new pkg?

7 points

10 years ago

I was able to track down the original developer of a .NET icalendar library that had been abandoned. (It wasn't easy.) It had ambiguous licensing and copyright associated with it, which made me leery of using it for production tasks. He gave me explicit written permission to rename, open source[0], and relicense under a permissive license[1]. He also relinquished the copyright. I've also published a nuget package under the new name, Ical.Net[2]. The trouble is that if you look at the download stats, the older, buggy, under-performing library has many tens of thousands of downloads. It has a gravity to it that my library doesn't. How do I close the gap, and give people confidence that it's safe (and preferable) to use my library instead?

* It's unencumbered by licensing and copyright issues.

* It performs significantly better. The test suite completed in 17 sec; the current nuget package completes in 4.5, and I have an unpublished version that brings it down to 3.6. Performance was my original motivator for working on the library.

* I fixed about a half-dozen bugs while working on the performance

My plan of attack is as follows:

1) See if I can get the person who imported the original sourceforge history to commit a deletion of the code, and redirect people to ical.net via the readme.

2) Contact the original publisher of the unofficial nuget package, and ask them to unpublish it.

3) Have better API documentation. That's one thing the old package clearly does NOT have.

4) Maybe do a "Tell HN: dday.ical is now ical.net"(?)

What else should I consider? What else would you do? What would you NOT do? It seems to me that so long as the old code is floating around, and has a significant following, people are going to use that one instead. (I know I would as a naive outsider.)

[0] https://github.com/rianjs/ical.net

[1] https://github.com/rianjs/ical.net/blob/master/license.md

[2] https://www.nuget.org/packages/Ical.Net/

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