For those of you who haven’t heard yet, development of the WordPress Spam Karma plugin has officially been discontinued and the current code has been released GPL Version 2.  While this isn’t a plugin we use ourselves, we do see it running on probably around 10% (+/-) of our clients’ blogs, thus the announcement has caught our attention.

To address what the future of Spam Karma may hold, we can only speculate from what we’ve seen in the past with other open source projects.  Here are some common scenarios:

• The project will just die. Since this is already “off the ground” we doubt that happens, at least not right away.
• An individual or a group of people will pick it up and run with it.  The majority of WordPress plugins fall under this category.
• A development firm will pick it up and take over development. This could be likely due to the high profile of the plugin as long as the development firm consistently has the time and resources to devote to the development and upkeep of the plugin.

So, with that said, we’ll keep our eyes open to see what happens.  In the meantime, Spam Karma 2.3 Release Candidate 1 seems to still work with WordPress 2.6.

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