Well this prevents my plan of "I'm never gonna die because I have to maintain this OSS project".<p>In the spirit of other legacy / succession features, is there an opposite option to prefer the account vanishes from the platform entirely?<p>This also reminds me of Debian WNPP listing where you can see requests of succession because of age/health/disinterest/etc. <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/</a>
I find it weird that they use so many euphemisms for death when its the main motivation for the feature here. Is it really that uncomfortable for some?
Total plug here, but please don't wait until you die to allow others to maintain the projects you've lost interest in. I'd encourage you to take five seconds and add them to the Code Shelter (<a href="https://www.codeshelter.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.codeshelter.co/</a>).
Does this only apply to dying? "if you cannot" implies that it could relate to other states of permanent incapacity (my dad has late stage dementia with no personal capacity, so this issue is front of mind for me) but then it goes on about needing a death certificate, etc. A power of attorney or similar would also seem appropriate for taking over this role.
"or presenting an obituary then waiting for 21 days" this part feels a little loose to me. Say you have a falling out with someone and forget to remove them as a successor, this could be socially engineered.
This reminds me, it seems the author of Dwarf Fortress doesn't use GitHub.<p>I hope he could gain immortality (you know he's one of the few that deserves it) so he can focus on what's important.
I have PoA for my father, and am the executor of his trust once he passes- in the hypothetical scenario where he had a github presence (he doesn't) would a death certificate plus copies of the trust, PoA, etc be sufficient for me to gain successor status if he never named me?<p>Could I gain it with only PoA (for property and/or medical)?
Might be nice to allow a private repo to be made public by a successor. Successor could always clone to a public repo or somesuch, but it might be clearer if it was a github allowed pathway.
I support the idea - but what is the typical use-case?<p>From what I see, people stop maintaining projects WELL before their death.
(With a few exception of really unexpected deaths at a young age - theirs and their project's.)<p>At the same time, for open-source project, one can fork them. Under a different leadership, the project usually changes a but.
Who is GitHub’s successor? This is a nice feature and conveys lots of info about individuals if revealed. It would be neat to see it on org accounts and for companies. It GitHub explicitly named that everything goes to somewhere (eg, sr.ht) when they croak as a corporation.
This is weird, because it requires actively planning for your death (which some people do, of course, but most do not), and also because it does nothing that can't be done by just cloning repos.