On a tangential note, I wonder if this says something about the way in which open source is delivered in a github world? Some of the best parts of open source was the flexibility. Someone isn't maintaining a project you want? Maintain it yourself. Or switch to something that's being maintained by someone else.

This is a rather abstract thought so I apologise in advance for it. I'm wondering what an open source world/tool that embraced that fluidity might mean for end users and core maintainers. Assume a tool called gitworld existed that did this. It might look like something where you can see which forks are best maintained. Community discussions can happen around all the forks as opposed to being against a repo by repo basis. So issues and PR's created could be applied by default to all forks and we might see which forks have closed these off? If I open an issue and a maintainer fixes it on her fork, the issue would show me that it's closed there and the final build exists there. It might also be really neat to have builds that become portable across forks so when someone forks my repo, as they work on it their code gets built and packaged automatically if I've done the necessary work to set those up. (not a very practical idea given resource constraints but it would be neat).

Like I said, it's an abstract thought but given the trend that we are seeing in open source management challenges, I'm wondering if it's time for a paradigm shift as it were in managing open source projects, communities, and expectations.