Vundle is my most popular OSS project. Yet I stopped contributing to it a while ago.
Here I’ll try cover my reasons and also to initiate discussion about Vundle’s future.
History
Vundle was written to serve my personal needs as an experiment. It took me a day(while I was sick) to get initial version out and I spent significant time after polishing it towards v1.0 which hasn’t seen the light yet.
It’s been serving my needs well as I wanted it to be very simple and easy to use, with no extra features and no extra complexity.
As Vundle’s popularity grew over time I got overwhelmed with issues people were dealing with. On windows, Linux, OSX.
I couldn’t afford spending all the time answering all those questions and reproducing issues, so I added donation link thinking that it may somehow compensate for time I was spending. But It didn’t. So I removed the link few months ago.
At this point I’m interested in other projects much more than developing Vundle.
OSS Demotivators
There’s another demotivating aspect for me: NeoBundle
Neobundle’s readme says:
NeoBundle is a Vim plugin manager inspired by Vundle
Author claims that it was just “inspired” when in fact if you look at Vundle’s code and compare with “inspired” code you can see it’s a copy including comments with some renames and additions.
It’s OSS and “shit happens” but I think keeping it as a fork and contributing back would be much more rewarding for all of us.
Maintainers and contributors
Let me know if you’d like to contribute or even take over Vundle.
Thanks
I’d like to thank all contributor’s that have been helping out.
Looking forward to hear from you!
UPDATE 05 Feb 2014
Just to clarify things:
I’m all pro forking and modifying it to meet particular needs. I’m for freedom of expression which is the core strength of OSS. I’m also for being honest and respecting work put in by other people.
IMO it’s a question of OSS ethics. And licenses are for lawyers.
UPDATE 05 Feb 2015
Author of NeoBundle contributed patch back to Vundle and its description had been updated:
This plugin is based on Vundle, but I renamed and added tons of features, while Vundle tends to stay simple.
Thanks everyone for your support!