Week 10: The ethics of digging

Whose code is it — licence vs intent, forking as continuation vs appropriation, and the question no licence file answers.

26 April 2027

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Learning outcomes

By the end of this week you should be able to:

distinguish what a licence permits from what an author intended, and argue about the gap
locate the revival of abandoned work within established conservation-ethics debates
formulate and defend a position on whether a specific project should be revived

What a licence permits vs what an author intended: the archived repo as a statement
The spectrum of abandonment: “looking for maintainers” to silence to “this project is archived and read-only” to deletion
Forking ethics: when is a fork a continuation and when is it appropriation?
Case study: io.js / Node.js — a fork born of governance frustration that merged back. Was it a hostile fork or a rescue?
The Ship of Theseus: if you replace every dependency, update every API call, and rewrite the tests, is it the same project?
Naming a fork: the ethics of keeping the original name vs choosing a new one
Community ownership after abandonment: who speaks for a project when nobody maintains it?

Muñoz Viñas, S. (2005) Contemporary Theory of Conservation. Elsevier. Chapters 4–6.
Coleman, E.G. (2013) Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press. Chapters 1 and 6.

Ruskin held that restoration is ‘a destruction accompanied with false description’; Viollet-le-Duc held that a building should be returned to a completeness it may never have had. Which position does a software fork take?
Muñoz Viñas argues conservation serves present communities rather than objects. Who is the community of an abandoned library with two hundred downloads a week?
Is there any case where a permissive licence should not be exercised? Name one and defend it.