To be fair, the usual consequence for a project that loses its Author is to die. It seems that github could facilitate the migration of an "ownerless" project

To be fair, the usual consequence for a project that loses its Author is to die. It seems that github could facilitate the migration of an "ownerless" project to a designated fork - including facilitating the selection of who has the designated fork. Just support for the informal process outlined in the submission. It's interesting that linus deliberately avoided having a "designated fork" in git, but instead made them all equal, and you just pull from who you trust. Of course, in his case. his fork was the socially designated one, so this was not a problem he experienced or had to solve.