This was thought provoking. Questions that arise after reading:<p>- How do you verify proof-of-death of developers who may be working from an environment where they can't easily separately verify their identities (e.g. house arrest, or people who are working in secret due to legal or cultural barriers to their being OSS engineers)?<p>- What happens to people whose death is faked, e.g. by a government wishing to take control of a project in order to introduce vulnerabilities or be an obstacle to further development?<p>- What happens when someone dies and people impersonate their family/inheritors in order to take control of their projects for unethical reasons? Given that a lot of the value here is political ("lead maintainer"-type titles) as opposed to physical (data on servers somewhere), are there any laws that affect this behavior? This is a regrettably common phenomenon with non-software inheritances; can developer communities do better?<p>- What happens when someone dies who didn't leave instructions for the event of their death, and the legally- or traditionally-entitled inheritors harm their project or otherwise act unethically with it? Is the answer just "fork it" with all of the FUD that entails? Or can something else be done?