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Inviting another GitHub user to be your successor
- mongol 5y agoDoes LinkedIn have something like this? I want my successor to post about my demise there, if I die before retirement.
- dannyw 5y agoGive your successor your account deets.
- execat 5y agoI think this opens another Pandora's box of fake posts from nominated accounts. Someone nominated their spouse, they are splitting and the spouse makes a fake demise post. Can legit get people to panic if the person in question is famous enough. Also, if you are careful with your accounts (random 30 character length passwords, 2FA etc) and your nominated successor has not, that's an additional attack vector. Personal anecdote: The LinkedIn thing happened to me. My skip level manager died in a freak accident (He was 44-45 yrs old at that time) and I noticed his profile until as recently as about a year ago. It still showed him employed at the company. I am sure people got "Congratulate <person> for completing his 5th year at <company>" while his profile was around. His profile has now been deleted. Not sure who did it or how it happened.
- mongol 5y agoFor me, LinkedIn seems the best channel to reach out to my network for something like this. I am not on Facebook and I don't think many people pay attention to obituarys in newspapers any more. But I think I have a plan now. I will put the instructions in an envelope and include the password plus the 2FA reserve code with it. I will put the envelope in a place in my home and let my sucessor know about it through an online service I have found and trust.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoThat all works right up until you die in a house fire
- hutzlibu 5y agoOr if the earth gets hit by an asteroid? How do you take care about your various online accounts then? I would just pass a note to my relatives with my passwords and they then may delete accounts, or not. I rather care about my real life to be honest, and not my virtual legacy.
- ruined 5y agowhat service are you using?
- mongol 5y agoI live in Sweden but I found several options offered by funeral homes/ undertaker associations. They are usually called "The White Archive" (but in Swedish) and were free as well.
- stavros 5y agoYou can use www.deadmansswitch.net to send people your credentials (make sure you encrypt them first). EDIT: I made this.
- seumars 5y agoI find it weird that they use so many euphemisms for death when its the main motivation for the feature here. Is it really that uncomfortable for some?
- manojlds 5y ago> An appointed successor can manage your public repositories after presenting a death certificate then waiting for 7 days or presenting an obituary Looks clear enough
- eloisius 5y ago> to manage your user owned repositories if you cannot At first I was thinking this was more general, like say you got trapped in Afghanistan with no internet and nothing but a phone line, you could direct your successor to take over your project. But then the process clearly states you have to submit a death certificate. I agree with gp: why the obscure language. Why not just "in the unfortunate event of your death blah blah blah"?
- thepete2 5y agoActually the trapped without internet thing makes me think. Why not do some sort of dead-man-switch? I.e. when you haven't committed (or been online) in X months the project is transferred to your successor.
- watwut 5y agoIn this situation, would you want to do complete transfer of repository? If you expect to come back, you want to give them just commit rights.
- sneak 5y agoDeath, especially in the USA, seems to be fraught with propriety pitfalls when speaking about it with strangers. I'm not so sure why. It could be the general American cultural tendency toward heavy euphemism. Naturally, any GitHub announcement is going to be run past world-class PR staff abiding by Microsoft corporate policies (that is, burn no bridges, offend no one, take no unnecessary risks with the brand). Microsoft is a US company with primarily US decisionmakers. a squared plus b squared equals fearful, bland, and circumloquacious.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dreadlordbone 5y ago"or presenting an obituary then waiting for 21 days" this part feels a little loose to me. Say you have a falling out with someone and forget to remove them as a successor, this could be socially engineered.
- NobodyNada 5y agoPresumably, this is why an obituary has a 21-day countdown rather than a 7-day countdown like a death certificate. I would imagine, but I do not know, that the successee would recieve an email allowing them to cancel the transfer within this window.
- killingtime74 5y agoMany what-ifs in your statement. you add them, you fall out, you forget to remove them, they socially engineer an obituary, you some how don’t respond in 21 days?
- dreadlordbone 5y agoFrom personal experience people tend to forget things. I think we'll see a front page hackernews article about a "stolen" repo with this method at some point in the future.
- NoSorryCannot 5y agoIt will probably happen but if that were enough to make for a bad idea, there wouldn't be any good ones.
- woodruffw 5y agoAt least in the US, the legal repercussions for faking someone else's death should hopefully deter anyone who would go this particular route in order to take over a repository. Other countries may present a challenge. I'm a big fan of this feature, but I do think GitHub would do well to institute a "real name"/identity policy for successors. That won't be infallible either, but it's another hurdle for a would-be fraudster to climb over.
- markive 5y agoHow does this work for private repositories?
- markive 5y agoI suppose as a Contributor you would just fork the private repo. I can't think of anything you would lose with this approach.
- RyJones 5y agoIt’s up to the person that created the repo if forking is allowed
- emilfihlman 5y agoIf you can see the code you can fork it.
- xmprt 5y agoIf I can see the code and clone the repo then regardless of whether Github allows me to automatically fork it, I can fork it myself just be adding another remote.
- dotancohen 5y agoI believe that you would lose the Issues and Wiki. Neither are stored in the .git repo in Github.
- ariedro 5y agoI thought the title was about which Git server platform is going to be the successor to GitHub once we've had enough of Microsoft's bs.
- woodruffw 5y agoThis is a great feature, one that I've wanted for a long time! Thanks to the GitHub team that developed it.
- diogenesjunior 5y ago>one that I've wanted for a long time it's actually been around since 2021 :)
- zestyping 5y agoDarn, I thought this was going to be about what platform will come next after GitHub and I got all interested.
- dotancohen 5y agoSourceforge ))
- prepend 5y agoWho is GitHub’s successor? This is a nice feature and conveys lots of info about individuals if revealed. It would be neat to see it on org accounts and for companies. It GitHub explicitly named that everything goes to somewhere (eg, sr.ht) when they croak as a corporation.
- withinboredom 5y agoI managed to get some IP when a startup I worked for shut down by staying until I was the last “employee” keeping the lights on. By then, I was a contractor though, and part of the contract was getting certain IP I wanted. It’s just sitting in a private repo and maybe someday I’ll get around to open sourcing it.
- codesnik 5y agoThis is weird, because it requires actively planning for your death (which some people do, of course, but most do not), and also because it does nothing that can't be done by just cloning repos.
- meibo 5y agoTransferring repos creates a redirect from the original location. Your userbase would be able to get to the new location automatically and remotes would still work.
- robjan 5y agoForking a repo is highly disruptive to the community and any users of the software, especially if the original repo is just abandoned with no notice
- edflsafoiewq 5y agoLess so than the death of the sole maintainer, I would think.
- johannes1234321 5y ago> because it requires actively planning for your death (which some people do, of course, but most do not), It is a thing everybody should do, though. Starting with a patient's provision stating which effort should be taken to keep you alive to a last will which should include not only statements about your property, but also includes requests on what to do with your body. Having that clearly written down, takes away a lot of problems from your relatives, who otherwise have to take many decisions in short time.
- thenerdhead 5y agoWell this prevents my plan of "I'm never gonna die because I have to maintain this OSS project". In the spirit of other legacy / succession features, is there an opposite option to prefer the account vanishes from the platform entirely? This also reminds me of Debian WNPP listing where you can see requests of succession because of age/health/disinterest/etc. https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/ https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
- jeppesen-io 5y ago> Well this prevents my plan of "I'm never gonna die because I have to maintain this OSS project". You joke, but that's what the VIM creator/maintainer said in response to the question of the continued future of VIM
- patrickthebold 5y agoRelated: When Knuth dies, TeX will be done. The version will be pi* and all bugs will be features. * Currently the version approaches pi on new releases. https://texfaq.org/FAQ-TeXfuture https://texfaq.org/FAQ-TeXfuture
- dannyw 5y agoIt would suck if open source projects disappeared from GitHub because their creators passed away. I can understand this for social media, but I feel it's not good for GitHub.
- thenerdhead 5y agoThey can just use the GitHub ghost account for anything public like when people delete accounts.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- buro9 5y agoIt's not really the responsibility of solo OSS repo owners to resolve this. It's likely no-one paid us for the code, we did it for a variety of reasons (itch to scratch, thought it was cool, intellectual interest, etc) but few to none of those reasons was to create an ongoing responsibility over the code. For my repos, I chose a permissive licence... either MIT, BSD 3 clause, or even AGPL. You can fork away to your hearts content, and I don't have to be involved in that so long as you respect the licence it came under. This does mean that if you are one of the tens of thousands of projects that imported code I wrote (or downstream from that the hundreds of thousands of websites that use those projects)... then yeah, you've got to fork and update your references, etc. And I am 100% OK with others (even a huge number of people) having to do such a piece of work... because no-one paid me to be responsible for the code I gave to everyone else. This likely comes off as harsh, but I maintain a few repos that are widely used and the only way to make this enjoyable is to not accept the responsibility for things that I don't have to accept. I wrote the code, you can use the code, whilst I'm alive and using the code I'll maintain the code... but otherwise the licenses make you responsible for your own use of the code, I am not obligated to do more than I've done. The code can freeze in time and fade away, if others care then they can step up... if they care now, they can become co-maintainers or they can pay for the code so I choose to take responsibility for continuity.
- passerby1 5y agoDoes this mean a need for "KYC"-like real name verification on github?
- temp12192021 5y agoI have PoA for my father, and am the executor of his trust once he passes- in the hypothetical scenario where he had a github presence (he doesn't) would a death certificate plus copies of the trust, PoA, etc be sufficient for me to gain successor status if he never named me? Could I gain it with only PoA (for property and/or medical)?
- detaro 5y agoAccording to the GitHub Deceased User Policy linked from the page yes.
- temp12192021 5y agoI overlooked that, thanks
- thenerdhead 5y agoI believe so. https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-deceased-user-policy https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-decease... You'd be next of kin & an authorized individual.
- temp12192021 5y agothanks
- Hackbraten 5y agoFor anyone who wonders, PoA apparently means power of attorney, a legal authorization to act on behalf of another person.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- leifg 5y agoWasn’t there a case where someone went to prison and no one had access to repo? Is that handled with this feature?
- MarcellusDrum 5y agoIt is not, as the only way to pass ownership as of now is through submitting a death certificate.
- K5EiS 5y agoYou may be thinking of Core-js. https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/26/corejs_maintainer_jailed_code_release/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/26/corejs_maintainer_jai...
- toast0 5y agoMight be nice to allow a private repo to be made public by a successor. Successor could always clone to a public repo or somesuch, but it might be clearer if it was a github allowed pathway.
- stavros 5y agoTotal plug here, but please don't wait until you die to allow others to maintain the projects you've lost interest in. I'd encourage you to take five seconds and add them to the Code Shelter (https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/).
- pimterry 5y agoIs there a way to combine this with the OP, and designate Code Shelter itself as a successor for GitHub projects? That would be useful as a way to ensure future maintenance of projects that are currently still actively maintained. Designating a volunteer org like this as a successor makes more sense to me than picking a random individual.
- stavros 5y agoIt's not very well-supported (given that I heard about this feature today), but you can invite https://github.com/CodeShelterBot https://github.com/CodeShelterBot to be your successor and I can add the projects to the Shelter manually through it.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoIs this really necessary? Can't other maintainers simply fork the project and start working on it? People will eventually realize the fork is the only version that's still active and it will become the canonical version. ZBar is an example of this. Nowadays it is maintained by Mauro Carvalho Chehab, a Linux kernel developer. Found out about this fork because it's the source of my Linux distribution's zbar package. Ended up contributing some code to it.
- stavros 5y agoWell, you ask "is this really necessary?" and then go on to say "people work around it by doing a bunch of work", so I think that's the answer to your question.
- stared 5y agoI support the idea - but what is the typical use-case? From what I see, people stop maintaining projects WELL before their death. (With a few exception of really unexpected deaths at a young age - theirs and their project's.) At the same time, for open-source project, one can fork them. Under a different leadership, the project usually changes a but.
- danieljacksonno 5y agoDeath isn't always predictable
- glitchcrab 5y agoYou hit the nail on the head but also missed it too - unexpected deaths can occur at any age, so it's not impossible that this could happen to the owner of an extremely popular repo. You can definitely fork the project, but there's more continuity if the existing project can be transferred to a different owner, or a notice added to the readme pointing the reader to the forked project. What about the deceased's private repos (which may or may not be important), or their account in general? This is all quite fresh in my mind as I'm currently working through closing all my father's accounts down after he died recently, and social media accounts are much more difficult to deal with in some ways than utilities, insurances etc.
- petercooper 5y agoDoes this only apply to dying? "if you cannot" implies that it could relate to other states of permanent incapacity (my dad has late stage dementia with no personal capacity, so this issue is front of mind for me) but then it goes on about needing a death certificate, etc. A power of attorney or similar would also seem appropriate for taking over this role.
- namelosw 5y agoThis reminds me, it seems the author of Dwarf Fortress doesn't use GitHub. I hope he could gain immortality (you know he's one of the few that deserves it) so he can focus on what's important.