Eric Raymond talks about the etiquette of open source software ownership in his article "Homesteading the Noosphere" (a chapter from his book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar": <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/>
I'll quote to save you the trouble of looking: : There are, in general, three ways to acquire ownership of an : open-source project. One, the most obvious, is to found the : project. When a project has had only one maintainer since : its inception and the maintainer is still active, custom : does not even permit a question as to who owns the project. : : The second way is to have ownership of the project handed to : you by the previous owner (this is sometimes known as : `passing the baton'). It is well understood in the community : that project owners have a duty to pass projects to : competent successors when they are no longer willing or able : to invest needed time in development or maintenance work. : : It is significant that in the case of major projects, such : transfers of control are generally announced with some : fanfare. While it is unheard of for the open-source : community at large to actually interfere in the owner's : choice of succession, customary practice clearly : incorporates a premise that public legitimacy is important. : : For minor projects, it is generally sufficient for a change : history included with the project distribution to note the : change of ownership. The clear presumption is that if the : former owner has not in fact voluntarily transferred : control, he or she may reassert control with community : backing by objecting publicly within a reasonable period of : time. : : The third way to acquire ownership of a project is to : observe that it needs work and the owner has disappeared or : lost interest. If you want to do this, it is your : responsibility to make the effort to find the owner. If you : don't succeed, then you may announce in a relevant place : (such as a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to the application : area) that the project appears to be orphaned, and that you : are considering taking responsibility for it. : : Custom demands that you allow some time to pass before : following up with an announcement that you have declared : yourself the new owner. In this interval, if someone else : announces that they have been actually working on the : project, their claim trumps yours. It is considered good : form to give public notice of your intentions more than : once. You get more points for good form if you announce in : many relevant forums (related newsgroups, mailing lists), : and still more if you show patience in waiting for replies. : In general, the more visible effort you make to allow the : previous owner or other claimants to respond, the better : your claim if no response is forthcoming. : : If you have gone through this process in sight of the : project's user community, and there are no objections, then : you may claim ownership of the orphaned project and so note : in its history file. This, however, is less secure than : being passed the baton, and you cannot expect to be : considered fully legitimate until you have made substantial : improvements in the sight of the user community. : : I have observed these customs in action for 20 years, going : back to the pre-FSF ancient history of open-source software. : They have several very interesting features. One of the most : interesting is that most hackers have followed them without : being fully aware of doing so. Indeed, this may be the first : conscious and reasonably complete summary ever to have been : written down. : : Another is that, for unconscious customs, they have been : followed with remarkable (even astonishing) consistency. I : have observed the evolution of literally hundreds of : open-source projects, and I can still count the number of : significant violations I have observed or heard about on my : fingers. : : Yet a third interesting feature is that as these customs : have evolved over time, they have done so in a consistent : direction. That direction has been to encourage more public : accountability, more public notice, and more care about : preserving the credits and change histories of projects in : ways that (among other things) establish the legitimacy of : the present owners. : : These features suggest that the customs are not accidental, : but are products of some kind of implicit agenda or : generative pattern in the open-source culture that is : utterly fundamental to the way it operates. -- Damon Allen Davison http://allolex.freeshell.org/
