Not bad, we might steal some of these ideas for build2 if you don't mind.

> other community members should be allowed to apply to take over that name. Of course, existing releases would stay untouched, but if I stopped maintaining my JSON library at 1.3.7, someone else should be allowed to take that over and publish 1.3.8 or later.

This part is iffy: if you release a patch, it implies that it has backwards-compatible interface. So this will realistically only work for taking over the maintenance of the old package, not for replacing it with something entirely new. I think a version epoch might work for the latter.