Curating projects of deceased friends
- by Ant
A very good friend of mine, and an avid programmer, recently passed away. He left nearly 40 projects on BitBucket. Most of them are public, but a few of them are marked as private. I've decided to take on curation duties for the projects rather than leave his work to disappear.
If you have been in the same situation, what did you do? Did you open-source everything? Continue development? Delete it all? I'm very interested to hear other people's experiences.
There are a few reasons why some of the projects are marked as private (private projects on BitBucket are visible only to invited users and the original creator):
One of them is an iOS web app that was free in the app store. I've had to remove the app from the store as I'm shutting down his web sites as a favour to his widow. However, I've already made the app public under the GPL v3 (he was a big GPL supporter).
One of them contains proprietary code. It can't be open-sourced.
Others are very much work-in-progress. I don't know if he intended to make them into hosted, paid services or if he wanted to give the code away under an open-source licence when they were finished.
Here's a list of the private projects:
Some kind of living cell simulator that uses SBML along with Runge-Kutta and Euler algorithms to do... something. There's a fair amount of code here but I don't know what it does or how far along it is. No docs.
An accountacy application; it seems to have a solid DB design behind it but there's little code on top of that.
A website whose purpose is to suggest good restaurants. Built on yii. Seems to have a lot of code but I'd need to set up a WAMP stack to see how far along it is.
A website intended to host memorials to people who suffered from the same problem he was. Built on Joomla. I'm not sure how much of the code is just Joomla and how much is custom; again, I'd need to get Joomla running to find out.
I'd just introduced him to Mercurial and BitBucket. All of the private projects are single commits of codebases he wasn't using version control with/was previously using SVN. I don't have the SVN repositories so I can't see the commit logs.
