> Sometimes when a package gets very popular other people step up to help, or take over. Other times the maintainer has a mental breakdown or just disappears.
It sounds like this author is looking for a third option, one that doesn't involve people management (1) or ghosting (2), and as far as I can tell, no mechanism for this exists that doesn't violate the current tenets of open source.
Correct. There's basically nothing in either the mechanics of open source nor the dominant open-source philosophies that says "We need to be able to throttle use of the software to provide good user experience."
A direct consequence of open source is that the good user experience burden falls to the consumer, not the producer. If someone wants control over the user experience, they want a closed-source model.
