My team just tried to contact some guys from an old open source project hosted on code.google.com. We told them that we'd like to join their project and commit to it — at least to some branch of it — but no one responded to us. We tried everyone, owners and committers; no one was in any way active, and no one replied.

But we have some code to commit and we really would love to continue work on that project. So we need to create a new project. We came up with a name for it which is close to but not a duplicate of the name of the project we want to inherit from. How should we do our first commit, and what should the commit message be? Should we just copy their code to our repository with a comment like "we inherited this code, we found it here under such and such a license ... now we're upgrading it to this more/less strict license ..."? Or should we just use their code as our first commit, with updates saying "we inherited from ... we made such and such changes ..."?