What I primarily question what happens or what you do for someone who is still running a bot, but no longer part takes in the Wikipedia? Pass the account? Shutdown the bot, wait for someone to reinvent their wheel?
If someone is actively running a bot and is not responding to complaints about its behavior, then the bot account should be blocked.
Part of the point of starting to collaborate on bot-writing on the toolserver here is to encourage bot authors to publish their source code. If someone does that, then it doesn't matter what happens to the original bot account or the original bot operator. Anyone who cares to do so and has the technical know-how can reincarnate it under a new account.
I'd be happy to make publication of source code a requirement for getting permission to run a bot on the English Wikipedia. Though to be fair, we would need to ask everyone who is already running one to do so, and if we're doing that, we really should have a central repository for them.
So, are we going to set up a CVS server on the toolserver, or something else? Or should we whip up something (perhaps a modified Mediawiki) that allows you to edit source code in a wiki-like fashion? Ooo, ooo!
-B.