It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
I get what you're going for but more important than my opinion of the principle is the fact that any such law would be impossible to implement and enforce. It's not merely unreasonable to expect a vendor going out of business or otherwise divesting from a project to go to the extra length of preparing, releasing, and hosting the source code in perpetuity -- who's going to do all that in the third case you mention? Do we write it into our wills? Am I going to have to pay a penalty on my income taxes if I declare my occupation and can't provide form 1095-D showing proof of dead-programmer insurance which will pay for someone to come to my house and recover my hard drives in the event of my demise?
The problem -- and it is a problem -- is fundamental to the existence of proprietary software itself. It's the whole point, really: your access to my program is contingent on my ability and willingness to grant you access. If I'm unable or unwilling, tough luck. The only way to resolve this outright is to do away with the profit incentive, which is going to take a lot more than just one law.
Some years ago I would have agreed - the problem seems hard to solve. But nowadays closed source apps are just private repos hosted on github.com and gitlab.com. Releasing them as open source is as easy as switching the repo type to public and replacing the LICENSE file.
Proving that a (private) repo is abandoned might indeed be a bit more difficult, but a good indicator is when the owner doesn't pay github/gitlab anymore.
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
That's not actually the case. Many proprietary codebases are maintained on-premises, with products like GitHub Enterprise, BitBucket Server, or GitLab EE, to say nothing of the many smaller self-hosted solutions. And this is more true the larger the organization, which in turn correlates with the popularity of the proprietary software in question. So the codebases you'd most want to ensure open up at some point are, in fact, the least likely to be covered by a law specifically targeting SCM service providers, who would themselves have to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance anyway. It's a nonstarter.
True, the popularity of closed source might indeed correlate with the size of the company. But the bigger the company, the less likely is that a project gets abandoned - at least without a migration path to another product.
The projects I see the most critical are tiny, e.g. a specialized app for few customers. Big software companies see no profitable case here, so single developers step in and build a product, maybe as a side project. These are the projects that get abandoned.
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I get what you're going for but more important than my opinion of the principle is the fact that any such law would be impossible to implement and enforce. It's not merely unreasonable to expect a vendor going out of business or otherwise divesting from a project to go to the extra length of preparing, releasing, and hosting the source code in perpetuity -- who's going to do all that in the third case you mention? Do we write it into our wills? Am I going to have to pay a penalty on my income taxes if I declare my occupation and can't provide form 1095-D showing proof of dead-programmer insurance which will pay for someone to come to my house and recover my hard drives in the event of my demise?
The problem -- and it is a problem -- is fundamental to the existence of proprietary software itself. It's the whole point, really: your access to my program is contingent on my ability and willingness to grant you access. If I'm unable or unwilling, tough luck. The only way to resolve this outright is to do away with the profit incentive, which is going to take a lot more than just one law.
The issue with hosting could be solved by archive.org for example. I think I saw some projects being saved there in someone's archivist efforts.
Archive.org could set up a git server to move the code base there and they are pretty big to at least have a chance to outlive others.
The part where you get that code when the owner dies, that's tricky though.
Some years ago I would have agreed - the problem seems hard to solve. But nowadays closed source apps are just private repos hosted on github.com and gitlab.com. Releasing them as open source is as easy as switching the repo type to public and replacing the LICENSE file.
Proving that a (private) repo is abandoned might indeed be a bit more difficult, but a good indicator is when the owner doesn't pay github/gitlab anymore.
That's not actually the case. Many proprietary codebases are maintained on-premises, with products like GitHub Enterprise, BitBucket Server, or GitLab EE, to say nothing of the many smaller self-hosted solutions. And this is more true the larger the organization, which in turn correlates with the popularity of the proprietary software in question. So the codebases you'd most want to ensure open up at some point are, in fact, the least likely to be covered by a law specifically targeting SCM service providers, who would themselves have to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance anyway. It's a nonstarter.
True, the popularity of closed source might indeed correlate with the size of the company. But the bigger the company, the less likely is that a project gets abandoned - at least without a migration path to another product.
The projects I see the most critical are tiny, e.g. a specialized app for few customers. Big software companies see no profitable case here, so single developers step in and build a product, maybe as a side project. These are the projects that get abandoned.