David Webb, a Hong Kong corporate-governance activist battling terminal cancer, said he would make the online database he built up over decades freely available after his death as “a gift to the public interest”.
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The British citizen said he received more than 100 offers to carry forward his Webb-site platform, database and mission of enhancing corporate governance and public transparency, after he announced last month that he would shut down the site as he had only months to live.
“I won’t allow anyone to carry on Webb-site.com itself, because I would not want it potentially polluted or corrupted with clickbait, crypto-scams or worse, or used to advocate something of which I would not have approved,” he said in a blog post on Monday. “The editorial side of it has to die with me.”
The database, which aggregates publicly available information on a wide range of topics from the board compositions and reporting speed of listed companies to Hong Kong consumer prices and energy-consumption trends, would be “a different matter”, he said.
“As my final gift to the public interest, I plan to leave all of it, together with my self-developed collection software, in a public repository on GitHub, so that everyone who is interested now or in the future can take it forward.”
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The 59-year-old former investment banker said that to avoid any future liability issues he would make the database available under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence – a broad licence that allows commercialisation and only requires attribution for the foundational database.