Condescending tone aside, what I read as being proposed for Ruby isn't the same as what is being shown for Perl.<p>In Perl, a dev says "Huh, I don't think this is being maintained properly", and then proceeds to contact the original author, and failing that, a set of admins.<p>The Ruby proposal, on top of that, allows a dev who is abandoning a project to mark it as such, and that then is individually findable or noticeable. This is actually a rather more interesting approach, as it means those downstream know when a library they're using is being abandoned, and can decide -immediately- what to do about it, from switching to another library, up to and including taking ownership of the existing one. The community can have a proactive notification of abandonment, if you will.