Digital succession

[codingjoe]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

This might be a pretty uncomfortable topic, but humans don't live forever. And sadly, some excellent contributors to the Python community have passed rather unexpectedly.

Since Python is the best language in the world and runs on almost every device, making contingency plans is important.

Describe the solution you'd like

Simple, name a successor. GitHub has a similar feature.

It doesn't need to be fancy and involve numerous lawyers. The successor should accept the invitation.

In the case of someone's passing, the successor should provide a death certificate to the DSF. Then all ownership shall be transferred, and the account of the deceased shall no longer be able to authenticate.

We might keep the original author in the list of owners with a small U+2020 † dagger mark and an in memoriam profile to honor the deceased.

Additional context

We could consider removing the sole owner mark when a successor has been appointed.

[di]

Thanks for taking the time to file this issue! Sadly we have seen this play out a few times for projects in the past already, so it is definitely a relevant concern.

I think our strategy here should be to reduce the number of sole-owner projects (since this has other disadvantages) rather that encourage their existence by supporting digital succession. This reduces the burden on the PSF (needing to verify death certificates, etc) and also might help unburden existing, living maintainers.

Additionally, we already have a process in place (PEP 541) for claiming an abandoned project, and the expiration of a sole maintainer is in-scope for that process without requiring a special designation or certificates. The one downside is that the new owner might not be exactly who the original maintainer would have wanted, but in past experience this hasn't lead to bad outcomes.