[llllllllllll]

The analogy to open source projects is spot on

Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time.

When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.

[oblio]

I doubt that a language dieing in 2014 would be completely gone from all record.

Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.

[llllllllllll]

There are plenty of extant languages that don't have an alphabet either. They will be "lost" in every sense of the word.

The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point.

The analogy to code is way off.