The maintainer seems to be doing a stellar job and giving it away for free. It's a bit childish to talk about someone going missing for a
month. If he got paid for it, he's be legally entitled to a vacation that's just about that long.
I can't help but think about the open source maintainer burnout that has been featured so many times. Let off your project for a couple of weeks and you have all sorts of people demanding write access to the repository. That must be up to the mainatiner and his or her vision for the project.
Don't misunderstand me. Fork away. Forks are the social contract open source software stands on. But please, for the sake for the health of everyone around us, think of what language you use. Someone hasn't "disappeared" just because they're offline for a while. Make him or her proud or their community and what they did in the meantime instead. That's also a fork, just much less of the "I took my stuff and left!" vibe.
And I realize I'm overreacting to the choice of a few words on a project I've never been involved with and never seen before, it's just that some forks are just hostile for no apparent reason whatever and it's so unnecessary.