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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

This a bit of generational divide -- I think as more developers, even those starting out later in life, just live with open source software as the norm the more of them will just consider opening their code now or when in inevitable happens.

I think we take for granted the obviousness of open sourcing something and having a community potentially continue development when you're gone.

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People were pissed with Bill Gates for close sourcing DOS so your open source is new and hip bit can get off our artificial lawn! <ShakesWalkerAndVi />

Actually software was almost always free and public domain up until the early 1970’s as accountants realized they could extort more dollars by making software licensing models. In 1983 Richard Stallman made the gnu copy left and fsf as a reaction to the role of aggressive sales jocks and bean counters in computing. The rest, is, of course, well know. But the 1950-1970 period was also, albeit less formalized, a heyday of more unfettered public domain development. I’d also note that concurrently in the 1980’s was the shareware movement, which didn’t generally distribute source but free binaries (or with nominal distribution costs to cover media etc).

The moral of the story is accountants know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and if you really want to kill something of beauty, let an accountant be in charge. (Source: I’m married to an accountant - while a person I love, she can’t understand living for any other reason than counting money)

The reason why originally software was free is that there were no software companies, only hardware companies shipping software with their hardware. It’s good to think whether you’d have a job in that world.

Well that’s not entirely true. A lot of software was academic. And, yes, I would. It wasn’t a world that paid well, but for those interested (and there were few) there was a lot of demand. But the pay was like that of an accountant. When I grew up it wasn’t a greatly enriching career but a stable one and I never doubted from five I would do this. I was lucky to land at Netscape at the start of the current modern software gold rush ride.

you might appreciate some graeber (and/or wengrow) for wider contexts

Does Github have a feature to just switch all my private repositories to public when I die?

This would be a useful feature. Though how will it know when you die?

Telegram allows you to auto-delete your account after a configurable number of months of inactivity. That neatly side steps the "how to prove someone is dead" problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch

But, not the “temporarily incapacitated or otherwise unable to login” problem.

Coma, incarceration, etc.

Yes, it's answering a different question.

But it puts the onus on the user to decide what they want to happen in those circumstances rather than leaving on Telegram to decide whether such and such person is living or dead.

Weirdly, the hard part here is reliably knowing when you died. Messy solvable in a localized way. Really, really hard to solve on a global scale.

Why not make it trigger on not logging in for N months, and after ignoring multiple attempts to notify you? This is what Google's inactive account manager does.

But Google's inactive account manager doesn't then publish all your emails on the open web.

There could be any secrets (API keys, etc) in a GitHub repo.

I was going to speculate more about how GitHub could handle this, but it turns out they already have a system where you name a successor and they get control of your public repos 7d after GitHub receives a death certificate or 21d after an obituary. But they don't include private repos: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

That sounds like extortion to me. Like, stop using github and we will make all your stuff public despite you originally intending it to be private.

We are talking about the developer opting in.

We're talking about an optional feature for developers who want it, that you have to go and turn on.

(And it should have very clear warnings before you turn it on so you don't accidentally make things public that shouldn't be. Plus, there should probably be some sort of way to tag which repose would still need to stay private even after your death.)

A deadman switch should be good enough.

If your executor sends GitHub a death-certificate, that problem is completely resolved.

Eh, if I don’t respond for a few months I’m probably dead enough. It’s something you’d enable yourself, so you’d know that all your repos were made public if you ever wake up from a 6 month coma.

There is a feature to nominate a successor who can do certain things to your repositories when you die.

Yeah, I just want to avoid having to bother anyone.

Feature proposal: it should display the comparison between the cost of licensing the software, and the cost of hiring a hitman.

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