Hi @RichardChambers! Thank you for being here. For account security reasons, we’re unable to alter repository ownership. This policy is in place to protect all account owners from unauthorized takeovers.

The best way to resolve this is to contact any of the owners and ask them to transfer ownership to you.

This help article can guide that account’s current owner through transferring ownership ownership to a different user:

https://help.github.com/articles/transferring-organization-ownership

Keep in mind if the repository is public there is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to fork it and request we remove the parent repo via private support at https://github.com/contact.

I hope this helps!

Thank you for your reply. It’s not so much that there is a repo I want to takeover so much as if a currently closed source project I work on goes open source, I thought to put it in GitHub and continue working on it for a while.

However I’m not sure that there would be more than me and one or two other people interested in this older point of sale software and we are all elderly.

I just wondered if there was any kind of an abandoned repository policy.

Actually there may be people outside of the US that might be interested in forking it and using it in their own localities despite the age of the software.

Difficult to see, the future is. However what you are saying seems to agree with the Deceased Owner Policy.

So while there does not seem to be a specific policy for this scenario, the general policy of GitHub is to leave repositories up to the management of the owner or the owner’s representatives.

There is no specific Abandoned Repository Policy which makes sense as the criteria for determining whether a repository is abandoned or not could be quite tricky to reliably ascertain without an owner or representative explicitly stating it is abandoned. But then the owner or representative could just delete it themselves.

Thank you both.

It would be nice if there were a way for the community to “take over” a repo by linking from the dead repo to the most “official” fork, and focusing all future development there (including a way to migrate issues and PRs).

I don’t know how to decide which fork is the de-facto new fork. Some kind of vote or something. Feature: Claim Abandoned Projects · Issue #1385 · isaacs/github · GitHub suggests the forks should be highlighted by activity.

The best we can do right now is make an issue or edit the project’s wiki to try to direct people to the new fork. But this is a poor solution and most people won’t see it.

An example is Abandoned? · Issue #22 · aaren/wavelets · GitHub where the author hasn’t touched GitHub since 2017, and many people have made the same exact bugfix in the years since.

Here is an Add-on that helps find forks: GitHub - musically-ut/lovely-forks: 💚 🍴 Show notable forks of GitHub repositories under their names. Something like this should be built into GitHub.

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    opened <span class="discourse-local-date" data-format="ll" data-date="2018-10-18" data-time="11:22:42" data-timezone="UTC">11:22AM - 18 Oct 18 UTC</span>
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    opened <span class="discourse-local-date" data-format="ll" data-date="2016-01-22" data-time="03:45:29" data-timezone="UTC">03:45AM - 22 Jan 16 UTC</span>
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The Perl package distribution library (CPAN) has the concept of a "co-maintainer" who has certain rights to modify a package (e.g., issuing a new release). Among the things an owner can do is to declare certain fellow "authors" to be co-maintainer(s). In the "Pause" interface, setting ADOPTME as a co-maintainer means "first come, first serve take ownership" -- handled by the Pause administrators, and useful if the original owner is dead or unresponsive (of course, they had to set ADOPTME before shuffling off into the sunset, or their estate could do it). Setting "HANDOFF" means "I'd like someone to take over ownership, but want to vet them first" and then ask them formally to take ownership. There is also "NEEDHELP" where you would like some help, but want to retain ownership.

This is the Perl package distribution system, not a source repository as in the manner of Github. It appears that you (or your estate executor, with proper written instructions) can mark a package as up for grabs on CPAN, but it's not clear what can be done on Github to mark a repository as up for grabs (or, available if I like the cut of your jib). I see there is a topic "adopt-me", but I don't see it used in any clearly consistent manner. It would also be preferable to coordinate the changed ownership of a Github respository with the changed ownership of a separate distribution system such as CPAN.

While I'm not planning on dying any time soon :-), I do have a repository or two that I do not plan to do any further work on, and would be happy to transfer it to someone else. How can I best advertise it as available? Apparently there are a whole lot of abandoned repositories that get forked, and then work is duplicated, the system becomes unnecessarily cluttered, and searching for the most up-to-date version gets complicated. Was the "adopt-me" topic supposed to be used for this purpose?