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What Happens to Open Source Code After Its Developer Dies? (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
The late Jim Weirich "was a seminal member of the western world's Ruby community," according to Ruby developer Justin Searls, who at the age of 30 took over Weirich's tools (which are used by huge sites like Hulu, Kickstarter, and Twitter). Soon Searls made a will and a succession plan for his own open-source projects. Wired calls succession "a growing concern in the open-source software community," noting developers have another option: transferring their copyrights to an open source group (for example, the Apache Foundation).
Most package-management systems have "at least an ad-hoc process for transferring control over a library," according to Wired, but they also note that "that usually depends on someone noticing that a project has been orphaned and then volunteering to adopt it." Evan Phoenix of the Ruby Gems project acknowledges that "We don't have an official policy mostly because it hasn't come up all that often. We do have an adviser council that is used to decide these types of things case by case." Searls suggests GitHub and package managers like Ruby Gems add a "dead man's switch" to their platform, which would allow programmers to automatically transfer ownership of a project or an account to someone else if the creator doesn't log in or make changes after a set period of time.
Wired also spoke to Michael Droettboom, who took over the Python library Matplotlib after John Hunter died in 2012. He points out that "Sometimes there are parts of the code that only one person understands," stressing the need for developers to also understand the code they're inheriting.
Most package-management systems have "at least an ad-hoc process for transferring control over a library," according to Wired, but they also note that "that usually depends on someone noticing that a project has been orphaned and then volunteering to adopt it." Evan Phoenix of the Ruby Gems project acknowledges that "We don't have an official policy mostly because it hasn't come up all that often. We do have an adviser council that is used to decide these types of things case by case." Searls suggests GitHub and package managers like Ruby Gems add a "dead man's switch" to their platform, which would allow programmers to automatically transfer ownership of a project or an account to someone else if the creator doesn't log in or make changes after a set period of time.
Wired also spoke to Michael Droettboom, who took over the Python library Matplotlib after John Hunter died in 2012. He points out that "Sometimes there are parts of the code that only one person understands," stressing the need for developers to also understand the code they're inheriting.
open for anybody to continue? That is exactly the advantage of open source.
It becomes public domain
The dead guy needs an incentive for 70/75/90/95/100 years so he can keep improving that code.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It becomes public domain
No it doesn't. When someone dies, unless their wills says otherwise, any copyrights go to their estate. It is up to their heirs what happens after that.
Yes, the code is available, it's open source, after all.
The question the article gets to is how do packagers such as Red Hat or CPAN decide which version to include by default - the old, established one that hasn't been updated, or the new one that has updates but not not the long history? That may be a case-by-case issue by it's very nature.
The other point raised is that programmers, up open source or proprietary, should make sure that two other people have commit access, or will get it.
In my most significant software I wrote by myself, I included a "dead man's switch" which I'm thinking about activating. In the license, I included a clause that said if my web page goes down, non-copyright is automatically passed to a certain person (I maintain my rights as well). If they choose not to maintain the software, two other people are named. If none of those three picks it up, it automatically goes GPL and anyone can do what they want with it, including providing updates and support as part of their business.
The person I passed it along to a few years may not be actively maintaining and supporting it, so I may post it relevant forums declaring that I'm now licensing it open source. I may also contact some of the people that make "competing" software and let them know they can freely use my old software, or parts of it, in compliance with an open-source license I'll select.
It becomes public domain
No it doesn't. When someone dies, unless their wills says otherwise, any copyrights go to their estate. It is up to their heirs what happens after that.
Irrelevant, its open source so someone forks the code and continues on. What the relatives want is irrelevant, all they have is an old project name. Well that and possibly the right to dual license it. But the existing open source recipient lose nothing even if it gets dual licensed by the new copyright owners.