What Happens to Open Source Code After Its Developer Dies? (wired.com) 78
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.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
It becomes public domain
The dead guy needs an incentive for 70/75/90/95/100 years so he can keep improving that code.
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To be fair, copyright law does make sure I have no incentive to murder you to save on licensing costs.
On the other hand, a fixed time like "20 years from the work's creation" would have the same effect; this is just an argument against setting the copyright expiry date to the death of the author.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Tell Your Estate Planner (Score:2)
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.
Generally this is true, although there are some other ways they can be transferred (e.g. they may be transferring the copyright via a community property agreement, living trust, buy-sell agreement, marital property agreement, or other instrument upon their death). The important thing is to make sure your estate planning attorney knows that you have contributed to open source projects and knows what you want to happen to your copyrights when they draw up your documents. Part of that should also be leaving g
You just fork the code (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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So you have no license on your code at all? How does anyone know they can use it?
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Generally, they know they can use his code because he has waived his right to sue them by purporting to give them permission by placing it in the public domain.
Lawyers (IANAL) disagree over if it is possible/legit to actually place a work in the public domain, but both sides agree that if you try you're waiving your right to sue people over it.
The problem is if the people who say it isn't legit are correct, and then you die and the person who inherits the copyright sells it, and no restrictions attach to th
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There are two reasons to avoid the public domain, though they're largely been relaxed over time. The first is that most software licenses include an explicit disclaimer of liability. If you put something in the public domain then you are not providing that, so though you waive the right to sue over copyright infringement no one else waives the right to sue you. That said, I don't believe that there's been a single lawsuit over merchantability of public domain code, and I'd be surprised if one didn't get
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Things don't happen that way, but most "open source" projects don't end up with ownership problems so much as maintainer problems. It's quite rare that the legal inheritor of the copyright has either the desire or the ability to maintain it. With most open source licenses, certainly with GPL, the next maintainer retains the right to alter and release new versions of the code even without legal ownership of the copyright to the existing code. But capability is an entirely separate matter. There can also
It remains... (Score:5, Insightful)
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As opposed to closed source where source code is held hostage and no one can use it???
Open Source is a better paradigm for benefiting society in the long run.
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I think you mean "as opposed to closed source where source code is an asset and the company will keep investing in it by assigning new programmers to it".
Re: It remains... (Score:3)
As far as I am aware, Thunderbird is not even an asset to " Moz://a" anymore,...
Likewise, Kubuntu is no longer maintained by Canonical.
Not to mention all of the abandonware on Microsoft's technet site.
There comes a point where it isn't cost effective for a developer to maintain software anymore. At such a point in time the developer holds on to the copyright, the source code, and name of the software so they have the option of rel
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Before I switched of Linux my projects were continually depending on software that people and companies just dropped for one reason or another. Going out of business was one of the major reasons, but not the only one. I've still got files in various of them that I haven't got around to throwing away yet, but which are totally useless because there's no possible way to run them. TurboCAD is one that I just threw away today. I think they went out of business. Deluxe Music Construction Set I finished clea
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Oh ok, Linux is the exception because you run an old version in a VM.
And you can't do that with your old software because... no reason at all, except that you want to crap on commercial software you once used yourself?
Your logic is flawed.
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Well, in the future it will be very difficult as Windows 7+ require either an internet connection or an activate by phone call in order to run for more than 30 (?) days. Once MS makes them EOS then you won't be able to activate them at all and at that point no new VM can be spun up.
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I tried for quite awhile to run MSWind95 in a VM. It never quite worked. There didn't seem to be an option to run MacOS 7.2 in a VM.
So, yes, it is a reason. And the particular software that I'm running under a VM in Linux is a game, so I didn't pay attention to it being closed source. Then it acted the way one needs to expect closed source software to act...but since it was Linux I have been able to keep it usable.
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Technically? Certainly.
Legally? Legally, the code is property of his estate.
Open source means that the source code can be viewed by everyone, not that it has no owner and is up for the taking.
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In his defense, it was at least true up until about 40 years ago. He probably didn't read the newspaper that week and never knew!
The code is available. Package management policy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Typo: non-exclusive copyright (Score:3)
I accidentally typed
non-copyright is automatically passed to a certain person (I maintain my rights as well)
That should say:
non-exclusive copyright is automatically passed to a certain person (I maintain my rights as well)
They got full rights to do whatever they wanted with the code, expressed as a non-exclusive license. I also maintained my own rights, so I can theoretically use library routines or any patentable new ideas in my own projects, or allow other people to do so.
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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.
That's neat when you have someone to name as your heir before your untimely demise, but it's not like most projects has an over-abundance of volunteers looking to secure their rank in the line of succession. For most projects I think it would be quite unclear who, if any, is going to step up and take over in advance. Maybe they need to feel the void of your absence, maybe they're secretly hoping someone else will pick up the mantle, maybe they don't want to take on the commitment they'd feel as the named su
Often, if few contributors, they care (Score:2)
My experience is that on projects with few contributors, those contributors care about the project - they are using it in their business or their own larger project, so one will be willing to take over even if only for their own self-interest. I've taken over a few projects for that reason. I became the maintainer not because I'm altruistic, but because I needed the software to work.
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What is "usable and understandable to others", though?
I always use brackets for my ifs, my ifs/else, switch/case, etc. You can't NOT see the blocks of code.
And I never understood why something as obscure as "if x:?z" exists, its purpose only makes for unreadable code.
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If nobody can understand it, it *will* rot. This may be a disaster as far as the project is concerned. But if nobody really understands what it is doing, replacing it can be...problematic.
Webalizer (Score:2)
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http://www.webalizer.org/webal... [webalizer.org]
> Last modified July 23, 2017 by B. Barrett
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The same thing as when the developer is alive: (Score:1)
Zero support. Zero updates. Zero documentation.
A major point of open source.... (Score:3)
..is that has no gating dependencies on the original developer.
If something is opensource then either it already has other people to keep working on it, or it wasn't filling anyone else's real need anyway, so doesn't matter if it fades away.
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A problem with FOSS software is that it often *does* have gating dependencies on the current developer. They aren't so much legal as informational, and sometimes interest, but they're there.
That said, this is much less severe with FOSS projects than with closed source projects, and the legal obstacles are absent, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any dependencies.
E.g. (a story from the 1970's).
There was this shoe store that used software to do its taxes, and since computer time was expensive the comp
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That leads perfectly into my one major gripe about open source projects.
The documentation is most usually either absolutely crap, or completely absent.
It depends (Score:2)
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https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/... [wikibooks.org]
"One of the main motivations for the usage of the GPL in FOSS is assurance that once something is released as FOSS, it will remain so permanently."
My understanding is that means in perpetuity.
After you go to
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So if the owner of GPL'd software is a single person and s/he passes away, does the right to make proprietary extensions to the code vanish for eternity?
No, it passes to the person's estate. The only thing that really changes (aside from the name of the person you need to talk to) is that the clock on the copyright finally starts ticking.
not new (Score:3)
The same thing that happens when a developer loses interest in a project. Either someone steps up to maintain it or it sits in stasis until then. It's certainly a better situation to be in than to be stuck with closed source stuff after the company goes under or stops supporting it.
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MUCH better. At least you can figure out how to read the data files, even if nothing else. I've ended up with a bunch of files from dropped closed source projects that represent a huge amount of work and are totally worthless. Now I won't depend on any software that isn't FOSS.
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Assuming that the original program ran on an x86 PC. Getting data out of programs that only ran on a PowerPC Mac is much harder, though older systems (e.g. most m68k systems, such as Amigas and older Macs) were sufficiently simple that there are now emulators that have decent performance. Unless, of course, the program in question relied on some copy protection mechanism that doesn't work with the emulator. Try getting anything that had a parallel-port dongle to work in DOSBox, for example.
Even then, ju
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Some of the programs I could run in emulation, though not well, since many of them were timing dependent. But I couldn't get the data from the files.
Recently I took an old computer, booted it up, and *printed* a bunch of the files to pdf. This gave me the data, but not in a very usable form, then I transferred the pdfs to a different computer, and now I'm in the process of recovering from the pdfs. This has not left me very happy about programs that won't usably export the data. And by usably I mean in
The same thing as closed source code (Score:3)
Old programmers... (Score:3)
Old programmers never die, they get redirected to /dev/null.
Abandoned property (Score:2)
Assuming that the developer did not explicitly designate succession plans, and that the developer's heirs don't have an interest in the project, the code becomes abandoned property. The law in most countries recognizes abandoned property as available to anyone who wants it, whether that is physical property or virtual. For example, if you take a refrigerator out to the curb for trash pickup, anyone who wants it is free to take it and use it however they want to. If software is abandoned, it would legally fa
Irony (Score:3)
I get the issues involved, the desire of many in the open source community to require users of open source software to make their own software also open. Still, I find it ironic that the open source community is worried about what people might do with open source software after the author dies. If it were truly open, one would think that they would be happy that the source code now continues to be free for anyone to use or modify!
Useful stuff will remain (Score:1)
If people need new features, they can add them. They will do so because it's easier than finding software that does what we want.