[byroot]

Yeah it's not great, but I wonder if I don't prefer this over maintainers that let their project die, don't answer PR/issues and never tell they would like someone else to take over.

I mean, I understand that it's part of FLOSS, a maintainer owe nothing to his users, but adding a line to a readme to explicitly say it would be appreciated.

[rmoriz]

He probably burned out and the only feedback he got was about some irrelevant licensing foo. I've run into this myself and this pretty much destroys any motivation to hand over something, in which you have invested A LOT of time, to someone else in a clear way without anger.

From a social aspect, github does not cover this. E.g. besides the technical stuff there should be an easy way to donate or contribute money to an author to honor his/her work.

Some communities, like Ruby or Perl, do have yearly events to honor people that provide a lot of value to the community. A regular voting e.g. for the "Ruby Developer of the month" + 100$ sponsoring could probably help to keep motivation up and hard feelings down.