Inviting another GitHub user to be your successor
docs.github.com
docs.github.com
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/
You joke, but that's what the VIM creator/maintainer said in response to the question of the continued future of VIM
* Currently the version approaches pi on new releases. https://texfaq.org/FAQ-TeXfuture
I can understand this for social media, but I feel it's not good for GitHub.
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.
I definitely agree that we shouldn't demand things from maintainers, though.
Full disclosure, I made Code Shelter.
And Luacheck is "the" Lua static analysis tool that pretty much everyone uses, so it's a very significant problem.
Earlier this year maintainer of MIT licensed zinit* somewhat disappeared from the internet. Issues weren't being addressed/replied to etc. This of course is fine, they're not expected to provide support or continue maintaining the project if they don't want to. However, in the past few months, the maintainer decided to remove all repos and organisations relating to zinit, causing everyone's profiles to suddenly stop working. People weren't able to initialise their dot files on a new machines. There was no backups nothing. I happened to do update my dot files to the latest version of all the plugins hours after the deletion of the repos, and my whole profile completely broke. I sat there for a good few hours trying to recover. Luckily git is graceful.
Unless there's a method to archive your public OSS repos, removing your profile means all your code will be gone too. At best that's an inconvenience to hobbyists, and at worst, it can break production systems.
In the case of zinit, luckily the community came together and were able to scrape back the latest code based on the local git repos of individuals. I think there are still some repos that have to be recovered.
* zinit is a zsh profile manager, allows for managing binaries, plugins, and other things.
I assume you don't mean these production systems are depending on reliable access to code in a third-party Github repo because that's fairly easily remedied by at least forking the repo once that repo becomes a dependency (not to mention potentially very dangerous in case of malicious changes), but I'm curious what the scenario you're referring to here is.
When are people going to stop feigning surprise at this? Being completely unable to deploy a new server just because pypi/npm/github etc. is down has been best practice and standard operating procedure for years now.
Keeping a complete audited mirror of everything needed to deploy your product and only pulling code for production from machines you have complete control over is so 2005.
"I'm the projects' owner and I can delete them anytime I want. And that just happened – I've had some say major doubts whether I want the time-consuming projects to go on, so I've deleted them"
I didnt know that the community took up maintenance though. I will have to check it out.
Looks clear enough
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"?
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.
Because a lot of "weird" cultural norms in the US are based on its roots of puritanism.
> At the same time, the Puritans regarded death as God's punishment for human sinfulness and on their deathbeds many New Englanders trembled with fear that they might suffer eternal damnation in Hell.
In this case in particular, puritans talked about death a lot. They have been kinda obsessed with it.
Always funny when organizations paint themselves as do-gooders and people even applaud them for it. While in reality Both MS and Github have contracts with ICE, there is JEDI, HoloLens, AnyVision, ... The tone-policing and pandering to the woke mob / cancel culture, is just to distract from the actual disgusting things they do. The Wikipedia entry on FUD makes for an interesting read in corporate propaganda.
It's an example of political recuperation.
It's kind of amazing the way woke culture got contorted so much compared to its radicalized origins and how it achieved widespread notoriety only after morphing into some sort of language policing movement with a nullified political impact.
I dislike war and all its horrors as well, but curious, what do you think would happen if a 'magic' event occurred and the US decommissioned its military presence and all advanced technology, command center software etc.. (MSFT/PLTR/etc) ? Surely no other country would abuse this in the next 100 years right? right?
> Surely no other country ...
I'm not anti-American. I'm anti-unchecked-capitalism. But I understand to most Americans that's tomato tomato potato potato.
Corporations need to be stripped of their rights so the result (tax law) looks closer to what existed in the 60's so they have enough cash to educate their citizens on basic common sense. A country that spends trillions on Pentagon and defense but is unable to provide basic healthcare, min. wage, 30 days paid vacation for every employee is simply a backward land of hillbillies and trailer park trash. No country hates their poor as much as Americans.
For sure it's profitable keeping most citizens dumb and below the poverty line, but it's unhealthy. And it also violates all laws of human decency. Especially when they're also in the business of tone-policing the rest of the world and exporting their "values" with foreign policies.
I really want the US to be a role-model because the world needs one. But bloody hell they should try a little harder and start treating their own people like people.
Personally, I am not a fan of this, but this is how I understand this.
I’m not saying they’re obliged to prevent that, but I can sort of see where they are coming from.
* well, I have a strong belief
I’d rather spend an eternity worrying than a second in oblivion.
When I lost my dog it was devastating to see other dogs. But it really helped me move on to just expose myself to more dogs and eventually even get a new one.
I grew in a European catholic majority country and I can say death is much more of a taboo and a Bad Subject to discuss in general (at least compared to protestant majority countries).
And yes, it is not exceptional to talk and write this way. And it was not exceptional in the past either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: I made this.
I would imagine, but I do not know, that the successee would recieve an email allowing them to cancel the transfer within this window.
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.
> Once we have received your request, we may follow up with a request for additional information, such as a copy of your photo identification, copy of the death certificate, and documentation confirming you are authorized to act in relation to the deceased user’s account, to verify that we are properly authorized to process your request.
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.
Could I gain it with only PoA (for property and/or medical)?
You'd be next of kin & an authorized individual.
it's actually been around since 2021 :)
Is that handled with this feature?
https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/26/corejs_maintainer_jai...
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.
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.
Your userbase would be able to get to the new location automatically and remotes would still work.
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.