Some years ago I would have agreed - the problem seems hard to solve. But nowadays closed source apps are just private repos hosted on github.com and gitlab.com. Releasing them as open source is as easy as switching the repo type to public and replacing the LICENSE file.
Proving that a (private) repo is abandoned might indeed be a bit more difficult, but a good indicator is when the owner doesn't pay github/gitlab anymore.
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
That's not actually the case. Many proprietary codebases are maintained on-premises, with products like GitHub Enterprise, BitBucket Server, or GitLab EE, to say nothing of the many smaller self-hosted solutions. And this is more true the larger the organization, which in turn correlates with the popularity of the proprietary software in question. So the codebases you'd most want to ensure open up at some point are, in fact, the least likely to be covered by a law specifically targeting SCM service providers, who would themselves have to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance anyway. It's a nonstarter.
True, the popularity of closed source might indeed correlate with the size of the company. But the bigger the company, the less likely is that a project gets abandoned - at least without a migration path to another product.
The projects I see the most critical are tiny, e.g. a specialized app for few customers. Big software companies see no profitable case here, so single developers step in and build a product, maybe as a side project. These are the projects that get abandoned.
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Some years ago I would have agreed - the problem seems hard to solve. But nowadays closed source apps are just private repos hosted on github.com and gitlab.com. Releasing them as open source is as easy as switching the repo type to public and replacing the LICENSE file.
Proving that a (private) repo is abandoned might indeed be a bit more difficult, but a good indicator is when the owner doesn't pay github/gitlab anymore.
That's not actually the case. Many proprietary codebases are maintained on-premises, with products like GitHub Enterprise, BitBucket Server, or GitLab EE, to say nothing of the many smaller self-hosted solutions. And this is more true the larger the organization, which in turn correlates with the popularity of the proprietary software in question. So the codebases you'd most want to ensure open up at some point are, in fact, the least likely to be covered by a law specifically targeting SCM service providers, who would themselves have to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance anyway. It's a nonstarter.
True, the popularity of closed source might indeed correlate with the size of the company. But the bigger the company, the less likely is that a project gets abandoned - at least without a migration path to another product.
The projects I see the most critical are tiny, e.g. a specialized app for few customers. Big software companies see no profitable case here, so single developers step in and build a product, maybe as a side project. These are the projects that get abandoned.