free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

and

inner source InnerSource is the use of open source software development best practices and the establishment of an open source-like culture within organizations for the development of its non-open-source and/or proprietary software. The term was coined by Ti ...

software, a

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

maintainer or package maintainer is usually one or more people who build

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

into a binary package for distribution, commit patches, or organize code in a source repository. If the maintainer stops doing their work on the project, then the development of the project stops. If another person not associated with the maintainer releases a new version of the project, it is said that a fork has been created. So for example happened with

uClibc __NOTOC__ In computing, uClibc (sometimes written μClibc) is a small C standard library intended for Linux kernel-based operating systems for embedded systems and mobile devices. uClibc was written to support μClinux, a version of Linux not ...

. Maintainers often cryptographically sign binaries so that people can verify their authenticity.

References

Software maintenance {{software-eng-stub fi:Ylläpitäjä

See also

References