Comment by shevy-java
6 hours ago
GitHub needs to solve the problem when one owner suddenly becomes inactive. Yes, you can fork things, but it would be so much easier if just new maintainers could continue as-is.
Naturally some problems must be solved for this to work, but I now have a few examples of projects that kind of died when the old maintainer (solo guy) became inactive. For instance the guys at BG2 at spellhold-studio solved this via a fork (from spellholdstudio to spellhold-studio). But it would have been so much easier to just let them continue as-is. This is one example of many more that could be given here.
How do you prevent hostile takeovers? That's the core issue here.
Owner X died and the next 6 contributors don't care about the project. Here comes Ron, with his 3 PRs from 2020, suddenly able to publish releases as if X is still here.
There are so many dead projects where the author doesn't even care to assign the next person, what do you do then?
I think forks are the best thing we got at the moment, with potential for some social bidding at the package registry level ("I vouch for Ron to take over the package, as I'm a known FOSS contributor")
that's exactly the kind of thing that would cause another xz-like attack or all the recent credential stealing malware .. except you can skip the malware part a lot of the time.
Don’t organizations solve this problem?