Guidance on unmaintained markdown-confluence project

Confluence Development
,
1

I’m looking for guidance on the best path forward for the markdown-confluence project., which converts Markdown to Atlassian Document Format and publishes to Confluence. It supports an Obsidian plugin, CLI, Docker, and GitHub Action.

The project has had no commits since September 2023. It currently has 88 open issues and 28 unmerged pull requests. The sole maintainer (Andrew McClenaghan / @andymac4182) has not responded to issues, PRs, or discussions in well over a year. I’ve attempted to reach Andrew directly via Mastodon with no response. I also raised the topic of a community fork in this GitHub issue, which got interest from other users but no reply from the maintainer.

The repo carries Atlassian copyright headers and requires Atlassian’s CLA for contributions. However, the project lives under a personal GitHub org (markdown-confluence), not the official atlassian org, and it doesn’t appear on Atlassian’s official open source project listing. My read is that this was primarily a side project by an Atlassian employee that received corporate copyright treatment via employment IP policy, rather than a strategically managed Atlassian product. I don’t suspect there’s an Atlassian team responsible for it.

What I’m looking for in order of preference:

  1. Resume maintenance on the existing repo - Ideally, the maintainer or someone at Atlassian adds community co-maintainers to the existing org/repo. This avoids fragmenting the user base and the 263 stars / existing Obsidian plugin distribution.
  2. Transfer the repo/org to community maintainers - If Atlassian and/or Andrew have no plans to continue, a transfer would let the community pick up where things left off without breaking existing links.
  3. Community hard fork - Apache 2.0 permits this without anyone’s permission, and I’m prepared to do it. But it means a new package name, users needing to migrate, and duplicated effort. It’s the least ideal outcome.
  • Has anyone here been in a similar situation with an Atlassian-copyrighted project? What worked?
  • Is there a recommended internal contact path at Atlassian for orphaned open source projects that aren’t on the official listing?
  • If anyone from Atlassian is reading this: is there a team or process that could help resolve the maintainer situation?

There are active users who depend on this tool and community members willing to put in maintenance effort. I’d rather channel that energy into the existing project than start fresh if at all possible.

2

Welcome to the Atlassian developer community @theherk,

Thanks for being such a good champion for that project. Indeed, the need for MD → ADF (and back again) has been on my mind a lot lately, mostly because LLMs know MD but not ADF.

As an OSS enthusiast, I’ve been aware of various iterations of Atlassian OSS policy. The policy active now and back in 2023, is that open source projects need a Manager as stakeholder to avoid these kinds of “abandonware” problems. But, even I have fallen through the cracks in that process, with a Python Bitbucket SDK that I eventually had to delete. Another part of the Atlassian OSS policy is that official, Atlassian-blessed projects are hosted on the atlassian org on GitHub. It’s loosely compatible with the OSS policy, but not official.

Practically, I have no means to contact the maintainer that you haven’t already tried. I don’t think there’s anyone at Atlassian who could facilitate the first 2 preferences. That GitHub org isn’t owned or administered by Atlassian. So, that leaves only the unpleasant option of hard-fork.

I wouldn’t have time to become a regular contributor, but I will offer to provide “best effort” support. At-mention me here in the forums or DM me. Are there any other questions I can answer or resources I could provide so you can take markdown-confluence to it’s next stage?

3

Thanks a ton for the follow up. The primary reason I thought this would be a good jumping off point after contacting the owner directly was because he seems to be an Atlassian employee, or at least was. I have found a great alternative project though, so even if it does languish the fork probably won’t be needed.

But I can say even more positively that it seems it won’t be anyway. Though I haven’t heard back from the maintainer, he has arrived back to save the day :tada:, and is again checking in commits.

4

Can I ask, what is the alternative you found?

5

Yes. kovetskiy mark. Not as many features, but it is a single binary that includes a native mermaid renderer. It has an overlapping set of features; pros and cons. But good that there are options.