Maintain a web application once the only developer is gone

hostingknowledge-transferlicensingmaintenanceproject-management

I have a terminal disease and there is a very high chance that I will no longer be in this world by the end of the year.

I have developed a web application that it is extensively used in my family’s business (a small hairdressing shop). No member of my family has neither programming nor system administration skills. I have neither close friends with those skills.

The business makes at most 10k in net profits per year. In fact, the business profits can only afford to pay the salaries of its 3 employees (father, mother and sister) and those are quite low and decreasing each year due to the financial crisis. In fact, I am not an employee of my family’s business, I work for a normal software development company. I developed the application during my free time in order to help them.

So far I do not care if another business also uses my application or even if the application itself loses my ownership. I just want that my family’s business can continue using it, which means system administration support if something goes wrong and development for new features/bugs.

I would like to ask you if you could give me the measures you think I could take in order to guarantee as much as possible the continuity of the application.

The technologies of the application are:

Platform: Tomcat (Java), MySQL and Linux

Frameworks: mainly JPA and ZK

Best Answer

First of all I am sorry to hear of your situation. I hope for the best for you.

I'm not going to tell you how to spend your time, but I have a suggestion that could keep your application living on and your family business supported.

Open source the application

In doing this, you will benefit the wider community, making the assumption of course that this applies to other hair dressing salons.

Even if the application is fairly proprietary to your family, contributors could make it more generic (and customizable) so it could become widely used. And you never know, perhaps this could become a really widely used project.

I am predominately a .NET guy but I would be interested in maybe spending some time on this if you are willing to open source it. Put it on GitHub or BitBucket. Write some (brief) documentation for newbies on how to compile, run and deploy the application, and let the community carry your flame. If you do decide to do this, please post a comment on your question or my answer with the details.

Best wishes, Sam.

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