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/
