This seems a lot healthier and more mature than the industry standard approach towards abandoned open source projects, which is absentee landlordism. He's giving people opportunity and the clear signal that it's OK to fork the project.
Github solves all these problems. Github rocks.
so now instead of searching around for the project's new homepage, you have to search through dozens of forks each with one or two bugfixes or random changes and find out which one is the most actively maintained?
i'm all for git's concept of forking to make your own development easier, but unless you merge your fixes back into a mainline distribution, it's just stupid and creates confusion for everyone else relying on that software.
say you want to run a script that someone has written that uses net-ssh. until now you could be assured that they wrote it using the official net-ssh ruby module and it will work with the one you have installed. so from now on you'll have to install the random net-ssh version that someone has stashed away on his github account? and what happens when that particular fork of net-ssh stops getting maintained? someone else forks it and now you have to install a different version?
what about the security ramifications of using some random person's fork of an ssh module that you are entrusting to login to your servers? would you install a forked version of openssh from an unknown source on your server or would you rather get it from a known, trusted source?
I'm not sure that's the best solution now that I am effectively an absentee landlord. The main repo is under my account and I get included in pull requests. It would be great if Github has a repo forwarding feature or trusted forks could be listed on the Project Page (just saw that). What's the best way to leave it in other hands?