Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Highlight

After Jim Weirich, a prominent open source developer in the Ruby community, passed away, the community realized he had not named a successor to many of his projects. When another developer, Justin Searls, wanted to step in to maintain one of those projects, Rspec-Given, he wasn’t able to gain administrative access. Instead, he had to fork the project and convince RubyGems, the package manager for Ruby, to point to the new version.