I agree. The author has released something into the world in the hopes that it will further progress for someone else or themselves. That's awesome. And the OSS community on GitHub has some great tools to fork the project if the author disengages.

But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors, and can be a real detriment to convincing developers that open source is worth their time.

It would be great to point less-experienced developers to a list of open source projects that are very responsive and supportive in their pull request management for their first contibutions. Does a list like that exist?