[searls]

Disclosure: I was a developer interviewed and quoted in the piece.

These are all good questions. I'd suggest that the trickier edge cases you outlined are indeed very tough scruples as they pertain to open source (but also as they pertain to all property & copyright law).

I would say based on the experience I shared in the article with Jim that it's very likely that a very large proportion of open source contributors have _relatively simple_ situations but near-zero planning in place for the inevitable. The best someone like GitHub could hope to ask for is a death certificate and an executor of the estate being able to produce a document that assigns the rights of digital assets to some named individual. It wouldn't take very long to do (and I did it myself shortly after I had this experience following Jim's passing).

But even that is a pretty blunt, communication-intense implement. The much, much easier solution for maintainers to simply share access & knowledge as soon as a project gains any amount of significance at all with people they can trust. Platforms like GitHub & npm could introduce pretty simple "inactive account" features that allow named beneficiaries to be added as owners in the event an account goes dark, without needing to bring family & estate attorneys into all this.

[zbentley]

Thanks for the thoughtful response!