However, if the project has a proper open source licence you (or anyone else) has the opportunity to fork the project and continue on. If you're not willing to go to the effort - that's your choice.
Without such a licence, the originator can claim copyright if you attempt to fork their code, even if you have the source.
I once had a manager - when he started at the place that I worked (several years before I joined), someone came up to him and said:
"I'm indispensable, you can't run this organisation without me."
He was immediately fired. My manager's take - no one can be indispensable. If they are, get rid of them and clean up the mess, it's less trouble than being held hostage.
Is it time for us to start over?
- Richard, VE7CVS
On 2/7/16 6:45 PM, Geoff Joy -KE6QH- wrote:
(Please trim inclusions from previous messages) _______________________________________________ On Sun, 7 Feb 2016 13:00:26 -0500, Bryan Fields Bryan@bryanfields.net wrote:
The bigger issue is 44net relying on a piece of software without a defined license. You could stop development of it and that would be the end of it. There is no legal way we'd be able to use your code and continue to develop it going forward.
I've seen this happen with countless other amateur radio developed projects, and don't want to see it happen once again. I understand wanting to retain control of this, but the only way it's going to grow. You're the founder and the architect, that's not going to change.
Well, in contrast, I've seen plenty of dead FOSS projects on the net. One only has to browse Sourceforge to find a dozen dead projects with zero contributions because the lead developer walked away. I'm not even sure there's a method for getting write access to them in those cases unless one copies the repo and starts a new one.
Personally, I've found projects that needed work, fixed some bugs or added features and tried to contact the owners of the project to submit a change and never heard back.
Look at GoogleCode for FOSS repositories that are simply frozen in time to no purpose. Sourceforge could go dark tomorrow and we'd lose a vast amount of code.