The sad death of a developer

[mnemonic]

I'm not sure if anyone knows, but the developer of the wonderful Acemoney software was killed, along with his family, several weeks ago in an aeroplane crash in Russia.  Alexander was a role model for what a developer should do - frequent updates and very active on his support forum.

Currently, the forum is full of people trying to find out what will happen to the software now.  As morbid as it is, do people have plans for what will happen to their software if the worst happens?

[mouser]

That is very sad

It's a good reminder that we could all dissapear without much advance notice and we all need to make plans for how our property needs to be taken care of.  Thanks for reminding me to update the document i keep listing my wishes.

[mwb1100]

It's a situation that understandably not many people (much less developers) think about planning for, especially if it's not a commercial endeavor.

One example that might be useful to follow is Eric Raymond's 'continuity' page: http://www.catb.org/~esr/continuity.html

Pretty simple and straightforward. I think the hard part is making the actual arrangements with whomever you might select as a 'virtual executor'.  Of course if it's a commercial situation, it should be handled in consultation with an attorney, I'd imagine.

[mouser]

Excellent page. We should make such a thing for DC.
Maybe we can just start a thread for it..

[kyrathaba]

You know, I'd been thinking about this very sort of think a lot lately.  I'd like to have some mechanism to allow my wife to log-on to a site I frequent, such as DC, using my username and password and one extra parameter (to show she's not me), and it would take her automatically to my Last Wishes page.

[kyrathaba]

Since FF saves my log-in info, and DC is set as one of my homepage tabs, I'm not sure how you'd accomplish distinguishing that she's not me.  A separate log-in ID/password would work, but adds additional complexity on her end.  Of course, I'm just thinking out loud.  This may not even be something you'd want DC to offer, as it's not really software specific.  But if one of our resident web-coding experts could do some PHP magic...

[worstje]

I use KeePass, and I simply have a master key I use for all passwords. The master-key is jotted down in a safe place, so is a copy of the encrypted KeePass database. If anything happens to me, or I die, those looking after my stuff are able to contact those who matter(ed) to me. I have put in special fields like ContactIfInjured and ContactIfDead. I might need to change the setup a little since my Paypal stuff is in there too, and I don't want people to access that if I am 'merely' injured, but the way I see it that is really the last of my worries at such a point. (Besides, there is still some legal recourse to deal with thieves-through-ebanking.)