Licensing Options for a dead project

Posted by Russell Durham on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Russell Durham
Published on 2012-11-12T19:04:38Z Indexed on 2012/11/12 23:13 UTC
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licensing

I'm currently working on a project where the original author informally told me that he didn't want to publish the source.

Since then, the original author has gone leaving me to be the sole developer on the project. I've tried to contact him several times about making the project open source so that I can have other developers assist me but he is not responding to any communications.

I'm not planning on trying to make money of the software, I just want a general license that allows me to put the code on GitHub or BitBucket so that other people in the community can assist me with the development.

Can I do this since he is gone and not responding to any form of communication? Is there a time period I need to wait? I know what I asking for is legal advice, I just have no idea where to start looking to find the answer so I decided to start here.

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