In general when an open source project is failing at something, the maintainer is failing at something. A maintainer has a lot of power over the project he mai

In general when an open source project is failing at something, the maintainer is failing at something. A maintainer has a lot of power over the project he maintains, but this power comes at the price that you have to make sure the boring stuff gets done: That bugs get triaged and fixed, that releases get released, that patches get reviewed and applied. If no one else is doing these things, then you need to be doing them. You should not be writing new features while complaining that no one is helping you with the boring stuff. If you do that, then people are entirely justified in whining and complaining about you and your project. Eventually, they will fork or rewrite it or move on to other projects, and rightly so. Only once you are fixing the bugs yourself do you get to tell people to help out when they ask about bugs or when the next release comes out, or when their new feature patch will be reviewed. Sorry, open source maintainers. You don't get to spend all your time pretending you are Linus Torvalds. You have to actually do work. I know almost nothing about Ruby on Rails, so maybe the above doesn't apply to it, but if there are 900 tickets blocking the next release, then at the very least, they likely failed at triaging.