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.
That is not what was being discussed, here.