Small project's life depends on his owner

There have been attempts to organize this, including one I know off the top of my head[1].

There are two problems. One is that an orderly transfer of control requires a certain amount of planning and coordination, which are precisely the resources that aren't available when a maintainer has left (or is on the way out). The other is that people tend to become maintainers of other peoples' projects by climbing the open source 'career ladder' from user to minor contributor to major contributor; projects are stable when they have enough contributors that the most-productive non-maintainer can be promoted to maintainer status when the original author leaves.

GitHub helps by making it easy and obvious to fork something and eventually have your repo promoted to be the 'official' one, but as with many problems in open source, finding a particular, specific person who actually does that is the hard part.

[1]http://thechangelog.com/post/1986814704/stillmaintained

This would be a nice feature for github. Also, additionally, if there was an abandoned open source project that had no activity on it after a certain time period, and the project owner went AWOL, a user could petition to take it over, get X votes and it would be auto transferred over. The project owner could stop the process simply by logging into their user account.

Isn't that exactly why GitHub is great? Love it, fork it, maintain it!

I really like this idea of an orphanage for abandoned projects.

Debian keeps track of packages that need new maintainers. With the large amount of software they package, it seems like the Debian project would be in a good position to create a similar list of packages where the upstream has become inactive.

http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/