Rodney Rehm

In 2011 I was working on an application where a lot of UI elements needed to expose a context menu and none of the then "state of the art" jQuery plugins could handle the load. So I did what anyone does in that situation and created a new plugin. Back then HTML5 was still new, in flux and exciting and I wanted to make something that was along the lines of <menu> (which did not make it into HTML5, but is part of HTML5.1). With a little help by Addy Osmani my plugin was able to act as a polyfill and work with the "native context menu" implementation in Firefox. Features were added and the interest in the plugin grew. Over the course of 3 years almost 50 versions got released. And then I lost interest.

In late 2012 I abandoned the software I needed the context menu plugin for. Until January 2013 I kept maintaining the plugin and pushing updates without having any use for it myself. And then I realized that I did not have time to maintain software, that I did not use myself, for other people for free. I stopped maintaining the plugin, stopped replying to issues or looking at pull requests. On May 21st 2015 I decided things had gotten too hairy for anyone to use this plugin and put up a notice that the project was looking for a new maintainer. At that point some 89 issues and 27 pull requests were hanging high and dry. I needed a way out of the "obligation to maintain my software", and the notice did the job of clearing my conscience.

Last week Björn Brala of swis.nl got in touch and informed me of their interest to take over the project. He made sure there was a budget for maintaining the project beforehand. And made clear that they were not looking to commercialize the project itself, but continue maintaining it open source, so they could continue using it in their commercial projects.

Today we transferred the repository to its new home in the swisnl organization. The change-free version 1.6.8 has been published to bower and npm and a few gh-pages redirects will make sure that existing links to the project's website find their way to the new home. As of today Björn and the swisnl team are the owners and maintainers of jQuery-contextMenu. I wish you the best of luck with your new project!