Sure, I'm not saying this is the only solution, or that it's foolproof. But this should be a wake up call for everyone in the OSS community to do better.
Projects that end up with a single maintainer should raise some flags, and depending on their importance, help and resources should be made available. We've all seen that xkcd, and found it more amusing than scary.
One idea to raise awareness: a service that scans projects on GitHub and elsewhere, and assigns maintenance scores, depending on various factors. The bus factor should be a primary one. Make a scoreboard, badges, integrate it into package managers and IDEs, etc. GitHub itself would be the ideal company to implement this, if they cared about OSS as much as they claim to do.
Projects that end up with a single maintainer should raise some flags, and depending on their importance, help and resources should be made available. We've all seen that xkcd, and found it more amusing than scary.
One idea to raise awareness: a service that scans projects on GitHub and elsewhere, and assigns maintenance scores, depending on various factors. The bus factor should be a primary one. Make a scoreboard, badges, integrate it into package managers and IDEs, etc. GitHub itself would be the ideal company to implement this, if they cared about OSS as much as they claim to do.