amilajack

Great overview from first principles of how an RDBMS works!

Yup, this is true. Flow, yarn, parcel, and glow are examples of projects which took ownership of existing package names.

You need users first. Users become contributors. Some contributors become long term contributors. To get an initial user base I'd recommend following this checklist I've created: https://github.com/amilajack/project-checklist. Also replying quickly to issue requests helps retain users over time, which indirectly increases the number of people that become contribute over time.