You may disapprove, but the belief that "you should only release what you're willing to maintain" is still there, and broadly held by leaders and shakers in our community.
The Markdown story is out of context: the issue was not John's alleged lack of involvement in the project per se, but the fact that he disapproved of other people doing so under the same name. Im not sure if it ever came to a trademark threat, but he definitely wasnt happy.
Those others felt compelled to contribute because John refused to specify MD with anything other than a incomplete blog post and a buggy perl implementation. If this isn't an example of community involvement exceeding maintainer willingness to advance the project, I don't know what is.
This is not about community involvement, but about the maintainer's responsibility to stay active:
"you should only release what you're willing to maintain"
The Markdown story was not about that. Nobody demanded John's involvement; all people wanted was for him to let the project go. That's a far cry from "willing to maintain."
> all people wanted was for him to let the project go
Why should he have to do even that? It's his project to do with what he pleases. Work on it, horde it, release it under the AGPL... it's his, nobody else's. Of course, that's not their impression. Their impression, and the general expectation, is that if someone open sources code, they do so expressly for the good of the community of developers.
You see this quite a bit in GPL discussions as well.
I'm not sure I disagree with those specific examples as much as it may seem.
I do think that if you're not shithubbing, you have a level of responsibility which perhaps[1] Gruber and TJ (the maintainer in the second link) weren't taking. And it's not clear to me how much you can claim to be shithubbing if you have lots of users and are discussing the project direction and taking pull requests. (It looks like TJ has since handed over maintenance of n to someone else, which I'd say was the right decision.) The third link also seems to be talking mostly about projects which can't be described as shithubbing.
The main thing I want to get at, is that you should be able to put something online without having to take responsibility for it. (Perhaps we need to distinguish "online" from "released".) That doesn't mean you never have any responsibility.
[1] To be clear: I don't know much about these two incidents, but the actual details aren't particularly important right now. I'm discussing them to bounce intuitions off them, not to pass judgment on anyone.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/responsible-open-source-code-pa...
"As Markdown's "parent", John has a few key responsibilities in shepherding his baby to maturity."
https://plus.google.com/+TomDale/posts/CkmmbjmvebM
"And if you release, don't release more than you can realistically maintain."
https://opensource.com/business/11/7/responsibility-open-sou...
"open source project leaders [...] have an on-going responsibility to make it easier for community members to contribute"