Ask HN: What are your plans to deal with the bus factor?

2 points by nilium 13 years ago | 2 comments

Note: For those not sure what I'm talking about in the title, I'm referring to this bus factor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

I brought this up with another developer recently and they didn't have an answer, so I thought I'd pose this to HN and see how it goes. Do you have plans for your work if you get hit by a bus and, if so, what are they (if you can say)? In other words, if you can no longer work on and provide what you work on, what happens to that work? What do you think should happen to that work?

This seems like something we ought to prepare for, seeing as most of probably aren't permanently on one job for our lives (aside from living, I suppose). Not necessarily planning for what happens after you die (though you probably want to do that some day), but just what happens when the software or what have you isn't something you'll return to or can return to, but you still retain control of it.

So, what do you want to do? Open source it? Stick it on a disk or server and leave it be for someone else to find and decipher? Destroy it and let that be the end of it? I'd like to hear your plans if you have any right now.

nilium 13 years ago |

To kick this off with my own plans, which are fairly simple, I aim to release all software I cease selling and developing (assuming I do both) as open source. Likely under licenses of varying permissiveness. I figure some might contain code I consider very useful and I'd want to see used elsewhere, but others I might feel better about licensing under something like the GPL 2 or 3 for learning purposes.

It's not a hard and fast plan since it depends on what I'm aiming to do with any given source code. That said, I would prefer the source code and resources necessary to work with said code were available to everyone, especially users who might feel like they completely lost something post-mortem, after a project is effectively dead.

nab1 13 years ago |

I also have any accurate answer regarding this issue. but I must say Stick it on a disk or server and leave it be for someone else to find and decipher.