A fairly important point that was left out is the license. If the original developer puts some form of license on the code, then people may be afraid to fork and maintain the project on their own because no one wants to try and understand the murky waters of licenses/copyright/etc. This mentality puts the onus of maintaining the repository on the original dev despite their intentions on making the code open source. In my opinion, if you are going to open source your code but with no intention of maintaining it, then make a fully open license in plain English that says anyone can take ownership of the code.