HELP NEEDED: Deceased maintainer

[elliot-sawyer]

Hi all! Many of you may be using @gorriecoe's wonderful silverstripe-link and silverstripe-linkfield modules. Some time ago, Gorrie revealed on the community Slack channel that he had been diagnosed with leukemia and he was looking for someone to take over his work. I use these modules extensively and volunteered. Sadly, I've received some information that Gorrie has passed away, and a few of his colleagues here have confirmed this. I did not know him personally, but if you did, I'm truly sorry for your loss. He was a talented developer and it appears thousands of people are still enjoying his work (148K Packagist downloads, currently).

Gorrie's modules remain very popular, and I'm the only collaborator remaining on these two in particular. Because I have not been the owner, I have been unable to add more collaborators or do some basic admin tasks on the repository itself. More concerning to me was the risk of someone middle-manning the projects by compromising either the Packagist keys (and redirecting them to a malicious project) or the Github repository (by replacing the repository and removing my access to fix). Gorrie obviously cannot take steps to protect his own account, so if it's compromised, your Silverstripe projects can start serving malware without warning and there's nothing anybody can do about it.

Packagist has now transferred those two entries to my account, and Github has transferred the repository to me. This means a few things need change:

1. The new home of gorriecoe/silverstripe-linkfield and gorriecoe/silverstripe-link will redirect to elliot-sawyer/silverstripe-linkfield and elliot-sawyer/silverstripe-link.
2. The original namespaces gorriecoe/silverstripe-linkfield and gorriecoe/silverstripe-link will still exist, but will redirect to its new home
3. The Packagist entries remain unchanged: Gorrie's work remains Gorrie's under Gorrie's name, and his legacy is preserved

I'm not here to defraud anybody or make a quick buck. I stepped in to maintain this module to avoid seeing it go unmaintained: the module will remain open-source and I take no credit from @gorriecoe's original work. Having said that, I do need some help keeping the lights on. If you benefit from this module and want to help manage issues and handle pull requests as they come in, please get in touch.

Cheers,
Elliot

[tomaszpirc]

Elliot, hi. This is really sad.

We use this module a lot and I am glad someone is gonna take over from Gorrie. On the last Stripecon EU, however, @maxime-rainville showcased his module https://github.com/maxime-rainville/silverstripe-anyfield that has some nice features. Maybe this would be a right time to see where to focus the efforts. Saying that, we were not been able to properly try out Maxime's module to come to any conclusions, but we will now surely do it and decide which one of the modules to use in the future. I am curious to know what do you think about all this.