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A risk of putting in a literal person is that you might stop maintaining the project, and changing the maintainer is now effectively a license change. It may be better to say "consensus among whoever is currently maintaining the project, as specified by the file MAINTAINERS".

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I think it's not the best, considering the chardet debacle. It would make sense though to have clauses indicating what happens or who gains the proxy role in the event the original author is gone.

Isn't that effectively the same as or-later? I can always fork your project, change the MAINTAINERS file, and relicense without your consent.

Indeed, it would need to be more specific, and say this list of people in this repo.

Uh yes of course, I thought of that and thought "isn't that neat" but of course it goes against exactly what the author wants. I don't find this fear very natural I suppose! A different trusted third party could be nominated, I guess (KDE project nominate KDE e.V. for instance).

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