But do you expect many people to want to maintain a software project, but not know or care which one?

Obviously trying to contact the author or previous maintainer of an abandoned project can be difficult, but then even this wouldn't help much as they'd still need to transfer ownership to the new maintainer(s). Maybe you could offer an 'ownership escrow service' for your target audience too. That would be potentially very helpful for people that really want to wash their hands of a project.

Sounds like a good fit for a student or someone who wants to break in to the software industry who is looking for product management experience.

People who use those products are best maintainers, and they know about those abandoned projects.

A person from nowhere will never became a maintainer of any serious product.

Users of the product may not know the product needs a new maintainer.

If you use a product and never caught a bug there then it might be that you don't need new version of the product? In other case you'll be looking to fix that bug / contact product owner and you will eventually know if its abandoned / needs maintainer.

I agreed to become maintainer of a project I knew nothing about.

How did that go?

Was it something you were interested in? Replaced an alternate you were working on?

I find it hard to believe that a project you didn't create became something you actively wanted to support. On top of that, if the old maintainer really walked away completely, and they don't answer questions, you're walking through the dark.

The project I'm talking about is Postgres.app. It's a GUI wrapper around a PostgreSQL server, so there wasn't a lot of code; maintaining it mainly means I need to make new binaries several times a year. I didn't need a lot of help from the previous maintainer. (But I have rewritten most of the code since I started maintaining it)

It just was a great fit; I work on a PostgreSQL client; so it seemed like a good idea to help people get a server running too.

Late reply (this has dropped to pg 6), but here's to you . Our team uses postgres.app, and I know of a number of others who do too.

From my standpoint, it is shocking that such a popular and great gateway into the PG world is in this situation. Complex, enterprisey software is now just drag-n-drop and develop. Postgres.app is really good stuff.

You don't have a donate link, but if you're selling your front-end, please promote it.

Never say never; it makes you seem very close-minded.

I really like this idea, and I'm a mid-level developer in the market to maintain a package like you've described. I would love to participate, and I'm going to watch this.

Just wanted to say thanks for making Betty[1]. It was a lot of fun using Betty a couple of years ago before the bot-hype took off.

[1] https://github.com/pickhardt/betty

You're welcome, glad you liked it!