[ricardobeat]

> Or maybe they've been really busy for 6 months. They're still maintaining it

If the project has pending issues and patches for six months, it is not being maintained.

If it is something that has a large user base, I think the owner has some degree of responsibility over the community. Either add other people to project or mark it as unmaintained, allowing a fork to take over. All too often you'll find a zombie project where the author abandons it for months, yet doesn't want to let it go; if he is a well known dev people will still flock to his project because he says it's "still maintained, I'm just busy", making it harder for a substitute fork to take over. Everyone loses.