Boost :

dave_at_[hidden]

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On Dec 16, 2010, at 6:04 AM, Bruce Adams <tortoise_74_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> You need to move away from the idea of code ownership, especially 
> in the context of a community project. 
> In a way it is a nonsense to require permission of the maintainer. 
> The maintainer is more like a moderator that an owner.
> In a professional context if someone does not have time to work on
> a piece of code or leaves the company then whoever needs to make 
> a change to it makes it. Its better to be more agile still and say its always 
> the person who needs to make the change that makes it. 
> The maintainers role is review and accept or reject patches.
> If the maintainer disappears then the responsibility for review falls to the 
> wider community
> looking out for and or using that package. 
> With something like boost with strong review processes that should be relatively 
> 
> straight forward.
> For other projects, if the source code repository is inaccessible or your change 
> is
> rejected but you believe strongly it should be included and cannot persaude 
> anyone
> even after review then you can fork but you'll have to take the hit of doing all 
> that
> maintenance work yourself if you want anyone else but yourself or your team to
> use your project.
+1 to all that. We try to respect peoples' sense of ownership but ultimately the only ones you need to get permission from are the moderators, and that's only if you want the code in Boost proper, because that's what we do here. 
For the record, the big effort to track down Bill Kempf about boost.threads was to get his permission to *change the license* on his code. That's a whole other bag of cats