> Github/Freenode could attempt to reach out to the current account holder to verify he/she is still alive as a first step I guess

Serious question, from the perspective of the providers: is death a valid reason to transfer control of someone else's intellectual property? Legally, wouldn't that be the property of the person's estate?

This is an interesting legal question. Intellectual property is part of a person's estate, but intellectual property isn't what's important here, rather control of a GitHub account (and management of permissions it controls). Facebook and Google for instance do not allow descendants to simply inherit accounts, and provide some controls for users to specify wishes for their post-mortem account management. Github seems not to have any policy on death.

They wouldn't be transferring control of IP. The original author or their estate maintain ownership of the copyright. They would just be transferring control of the GH account.

The only potential problem is if the account has any private repositories, but GH could archive and/or delete those beforehand.

What is this if not IP? The right to exercise control over an asset is common for normal property at least.

Yes, but the property here is control over the legal rights of the code, not the Github account.

Having copyright over the code means being able to provide copies under a license of their choice. They still wouldn't be able to do that: relicensing the code would be illegal. They could only use it under the same license they already had.

The Github account is not IP, it's just a property of Github's system, and it belongs to them (GH), not to the copyright holder.

When a friend of mine passed away, GitHub changed his account into an org for us, so we could use it for a memorial.

Luckily, one of our group of friends worked for GitHub and helped facilitate the transfer. Not sure how we would have done it otherwise.

If the project can reach said person, why would Github/Freenode be able to?

*can't