[gganley]

Instead of being a prick like the other responder I'm going to give you a half informed understanding. Basically nothing. Lots of projects that are used on a daily basis in production have no maintainers. There is a web UI showing the number of Debian packages with no active maintainer.

[gnoack]

This is the project that maintains the user-facing documentation for Linux itself.

Anyone who does system administration on Linux, who uses the command line, or who programs in C is relying on this documentation.

Also, it is not the Debian package maintainer stepping down, but the project maintainer.

[imglorp]

Found it. Packages in need of a new maintainer: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/work_needing

[gnoack]

It is not the Debian package maintainer stepping down here, but the project maintainer.

[captn3m0]

Wondering what’s the oldest orphan package on the list.