(Bloomberg) — David Webb, the Hong Kong activist investor battling cancer, said he will make his online database built up over decades available for public access on Github after his death.
British-born Webb wrote in an online blog post Monday he has received more than 100 offers to help with his website and the database since announcing in February he had months left to live and would shutter the site, along with all its data. He said in his latest post that Webb-site.com will still be closed down.
“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,” Webb wrote.
Webb founded his website since 1998 and used it to track everything from Hong Kong’s corporate filings to the city’s statutory and advisory bodies. A resident of Hong Kong since Barclays Plc moved him to the city in 1991, the Briton made his spotting winning trades in the city’s volatile small- and mid-cap market.
“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 wrote. “The editorial side of it has to die with me.”
The database will be under the Creative Commons CC-BY licence, a wide license which allows commercialization and only requires attribution for the foundational database, Webb said, while the founder himself won’t be liable for any subsequent action by members of the public.
“It is my hope that at least one public-interest entity will see merit in continuing to collect data and make it freely available,” he wrote.
A supporter of free markets, Webb has often railed against the city’s monopolies and tycoon-dominated industries. He’s also been an astute investor. He previously estimated his annualized gains between 1995 and 2019 at 20%, which helped him amass a fortune of $170 million.
Webb said he has been overwhelmed by the thousands of people who sent him tributes and good wishes.
“Some of them have moved me to tears,” he wrote. “While I don’t have time to respond to everyone individually, I want you to know that each one of them means a lot to me and for my family to know how much my work has meant to others.”
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