Imagine a highly-specific open source library whose website has disappeared, or has been abandoned. Is it on-topic to ask whether the project still lives somewhere else, maybe as a fork under another name? It can be very difficult to find even with good Google skills.
Here is such a question: Where is csharp-sqlite now maintained? (6 upvotes 2 downvotes 2 close)
It can be very difficult to find even with good Google skills.
That sentence persuaded me that these should be allowed: they're about an open source topic - the project itself, being open source - and we're here to help with open source questions. Having access to more people who might have different Google skills means it's more likely to get solved.
In essence, these are specific questions, which are allowed.
On other sites these types of questions are often called resource/reference requests, and are usually considered on-topic. Note that these are distinct from resource recommendation questions, which are usually off-topic. In as far as the type of question is concerned they should be allowed. With the upcoming closure of Google Code these questions will surely become more common.
I'm not sure whether they're close enough to our site's core topic though. Others have rightly pointed out that these questions risk being off-topic because the only connection to our topic is that the projects are open source - if you could ask an identical question about a non-FLOSS project, then that's a problem sign.
So I'd like to propose some criteria:
If you have suggestions about these criteria please comment below.
No, by the same principle as Are technical questions about specific software that happens to be open source on-topic?
Citing Robert Cartaino's answer:
Your example question is not about the SUBJECT of open source. The open source component of this question is only coincidental.
The fact that this project is open-source is coincidental (at most, it's relevant that the project was downloadable from a web page, which is a far cry from meaning that it's open-source). The question is unrelated to open-sourceness, or to how to work with open source.
I would say that ultimately, it's a matter of audience. This site is for questions that are relevant to people who participate in open source projects. What some old arcane project might have become is irrelevant. It's the old boat programming discussion. (The original boat programming question that sparked this actually had different issues, but that's not relevant here.) The mere fact that a programmer might happen to be programming on a boat doesn't make questions about being on a boat on-topic on a site about programming. A question has to be relevant to the audience of the site. “Where has this project gone” isn't.
The site most similar to us is probably Open Data.
At Open Data, while license-related questions are numerous, there are even more questions about particular open datasets. Those questions:
Some are about the history of a particular dataset, for instance a dataset that used to be available at URL1 bit can not be found anymore (example). Often someone has kept a copy of the dataset somewhere, or it has been merged into a larger dataset, or it is now maintained by a different organization under a different name. As you know, the exact same events happen frequently with open source code.
I can't find the URL anymore, but there was a blog post or beta advice piece that told betas how questions should not be about the concept itself, and instead should be questions that arise in the context of this concept, for instance questions on the aviation site are not about the aviation concept itself, but down-to-earth (so to say) questions about particular planes. If anyone know the URL for that please edit or comment, thanks!
