How ethical is it to rename a project?

Question

open source

The bottom line is - for example, I'm doing a fork of a certain library on GitHub. Suppose, for the reason that it is no longer developed. The question is - how ethical is it to rename it or change the package name? Or is it enough to keep the author's name in the License comments, if they exist, and don't care about the rest?

Answer 1

> The bottom line is - for example, I'm doing a fork of some library
Is it at least free?
> on GitHub.
Who cares?
> How ethical is it to rename it or change the package name? Or is it enough to keep the author's name in the License comments, if they exist, and don't care about the rest?
Before talking about ethics and morality, it is worth looking at the * legal * side.
First, you must comply with the terms of the copyright license agreement. There are a number of free licenses that *commit* you to rename it. However, I can reassure you - they are very marginal, none of the GNU licenses, in particular the GNU GPL, and therefore none of the licenses compatible [0] with it, is one of them.
Secondly, it is worth looking at what is there about other monopoly rights. Even a free program's name and logo can be arbitrarily protected as a trademark. A well-known example is Firefox [1].
Thirdly, you definitely don’t need to “spit” anywhere, read if anything is written in the contract: a) about indicating the names of copyright holders and / or authors, b) about the inadmissibility of passing off your version as the original.
Now to morality.
First, as Comrade rightly notes. sim3x , do not assume that the last author is your enemy. Why not just ask him?
And secondly, your behavior may be considered unethical if you *not* rename the program. The typical way to rename a program whose last maintainer is missing is to add a postfix -ng[2] to the name, which means "next generation".
[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.ru.html
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademark...
[2] https: //packages.debian.org/search?suite=sid&search...

Answer 2

Ask the author for his opinion

Answer 3

For starters, it would be good to fork the library and make a pull request. If the author is normal and your code is humane, then he will accept your request. In any case, try to contact the author. Wait a week, people can have their own business.
If a person does not answer and disappeared, then there is nothing to do. Keep working on your fork, you can rename it, etc. Now this is your project.
In many cases, authors respond or accept edits. If you contribute enough, you can get full access to the repository.