Somewhat OT but I just read this depressing news about a formerly open-source project and thought about what you wrote in another thread: http://wiringpi.com/wiringpi-deprecated/
I think that if one publishes an open-source project one has to draw some very clear lines about the support and instead encourage other people to dig into it if they want additional features or such.
In my experience tools like Git can help a lot. It makes it easy for everybody to add features, test them, and generate a pull request for the maintainer to add the new code into the main branch. And if the maintainer loses interest it is still possible for others to create new branches and develop the project further.