What is the correct thing to do when reusing code from an old, abandoned project?

Question

I've recently reused the source code from an old project - Anonymous Publishing that seems to have been abandoned around 2008 as a Drupal 5 development version. There has never been an official release of Anonymous Publishing

I'm interested in the functionality Anonymous Publishing offers for my some of my own Drupal 7 sites, and have started work to convert it to Drupal 7. The conversion project is currently in my sandbox. However, the entire idea for this module and about 80 % of the code in the sandbox is from the original author (Ronny López).

I plan to develop this to the point when it is fully debugged and tested, and ready to be placed under drupal.org/projects as an "official" contributed module.

I wonder: What is the "right" thing to (do according to protocol on Drupal.org)? I believe my options are:

1. To request to become the official maintainer of the abandoned module, and to release my Drupal 7 port as a "continuation" of the abandoned module.

2. To release my project as a "new" module, with just an acknowledgement pointing back to the previous project.

My question is: What is generally considered the correct thing to do in a case like this?

Answer 1

Request to become the new maintainer, and push your changes as the continuation of the old project.

That is the correct thing to do.