You core complaint seems to be that maintainers don't maintain their software. This is sadly true in many cases, but I would argue that GitHub has actually impr

You core complaint seems to be that maintainers don't maintain their software. This is sadly true in many cases, but I would argue that GitHub has actually improved the situation. First, by making it trivial to get patches to the maintainer. Prior to GitHub, if you wrote a patch for a project, you would have to track down the appropriate channel to submit the patch, then jump through any hoops required. Whether it be mail directly to the maintainer, a patch on a bugtracker (probably also requiring signup), mail to a mailing list (again probably requiring signup), patch having to be in a particular format, etc. The second problem is what to do if the maintainer doesn't respond? Sometimes you might end up forking the project and hosting it in yet another random web page. Sometimes you might just end up dumping the patch onto the net, in the vain hope that someone else would find it if they had the same problem. I have done both, a number of times. With GitHub, the patches are clearly there as forks. At least with GitHub, the barrier to writing a patch and getting it in the face of the maintainer is almost zero. This is an improvement. If they don't respond, at least it's obvious to users from the proliferation of forks, and if they're lucky they can find the particular fork that fixes their issue. Solving the human problem of maintenance is a big challenge. If GitHub solves that as well, I'll be amazed.