[boris]

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.

[majewsky]

That's something the curators would have to look out for. If you're building a green-field solution, I'd also suggest to outright reject library versions that don't follow semantic versioning. A patch version bump that changes the API? Not allowed, go bump your minor version and come back. A minor version that breaks existing users? Not allowed either. It's a really easy check. I'm honestly baffled no one's doing it yet.

(Side-note: I'm only talking about libraries here, not applications.)