Heilmann: Don’t call it “open source” unless you mean it

It should be clear to anyone who's been following Open Source (and Free Software) long enough, that it's actually about giving sufficiently motivated people all of the information they need to make the software work for them (assuming that this information was what you used to make the software in the first place), and allow them to share their work with others. The point is that you aren't dependant on the original author. I would actually make the exact opposite claim from this article: something isn't really Open Source unless, were the entire community to get wiped out by a pandemic, a user would still be able to keep the software running, with sufficient skill and motivation, based on what's available from github.

On the other hand, I think there's a need for some sort of useful label for projects which are maintained effectively, in that somebody is coordinating the people who are making modifications with each other and with other people who could benefit from them.

But you can't really legitimately complain about somebody else not maintaining a project well unless you've offered to take over maintaining it. And, with git, it's actually entirely reasonable to have two people maintain the same thing separately for a while to see who's actually more interested. It can actually even be helpful to the maintainer for somebody else to pick up patches and pull requests and have a tree of stuff the maintainer hasn't accepted.