4 ms·

It 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 g

by dannyw 5y ago

It 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 ago
They can just use the GitHub ghost account for anything public like when people delete accounts.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
buro9 5y ago
It'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.
- stavros 5y ago
  I agree in general, but doing something like adding the project to https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/ so someone else can pick it up if you're no longer interested in it doesn't seem like such a huge hassle, no? I definitely agree that we shouldn't demand things from maintainers, though. Full disclosure, I made Code Shelter.
nonbirithm 5y ago
Sadly, the scenario that the successor feature is intended to prevent has very much become reality in the past. The creator of Luacheck (Peter Melnichenko) passed away a couple of years ago, and ever since then the GitHub repository has been in a state of limbo. Multiple unofficial forks have come and gone, but Peter's is still the first result on Google if you search "luacheck". It isn't even possible to change the README or pin an issue to get people's attention about the primary fork; to this day people are still posting issues to the old repo. And Luacheck is "the" Lua static analysis tool that pretty much everyone uses, so it's a very significant problem. https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck/issues/198 https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck/issues/198

by dannyw 5y ago

It 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 ago

They can just use the GitHub ghost account for anything public like when people delete accounts.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

buro9 5y ago

It'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.

stavros 5y ago
I agree in general, but doing something like adding the project to https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/ so someone else can pick it up if you're no longer interested in it doesn't seem like such a huge hassle, no? I definitely agree that we shouldn't demand things from maintainers, though. Full disclosure, I made Code Shelter.

nonbirithm 5y ago

Sadly, the scenario that the successor feature is intended to prevent has very much become reality in the past. The creator of Luacheck (Peter Melnichenko) passed away a couple of years ago, and ever since then the GitHub repository has been in a state of limbo. Multiple unofficial forks have come and gone, but Peter's is still the first result on Google if you search "luacheck". It isn't even possible to change the README or pin an issue to get people's attention about the primary fork; to this day people are still posting issues to the old repo. And Luacheck is "the" Lua static analysis tool that pretty much everyone uses, so it's a very significant problem. https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck/issues/198 https://github.com/mpeterv/luacheck/issues/198