> "I'm trying to work backwards from "how do we stop bad actor Tan from getting maintainer access to the project?" Creating an identify-verified relationship (employment) is a good fit for that, I think."

It would stop a sock puppet, but Jai Tan might be a real person, a real developer paid or blackmailed by a hostile group; Amazon might just have hired him and handed over maintainer access to him thinking it was above board, if a problem hadn't been found yet. I don't know where Jai Tan claimed to be from, but it's quite possible they would say "I don't have a passport", "I can't leave my family to travel to America for an in-person interview", "I'm not in good health to travel", "I don't speak English well enough for an in-person interview", "I live in a poor country without a functioning government and have no tax documents", or etc. etc. excuses which are quite plausible

> "Or, if he was feeling burnt out, he may have felt more comfortable passing the torch earlier if there was a clear framework to do so, backed by an entity that can do some of the heavy lifting of naming/validating a successor."

Your suggested $200k is equivalent to £160k GBP in the UK; look at this UK average salary list: https://uk.jobted.com/ no job comes close; not Managing Director, IT director, Finance Director, Aerospace engineer, DevOps engineer, neurosurgeon, nothing on the list is above £110k. Sure there are many people earning that much as a senior devops AI cloud security specialist in a fast paced London based fintech trading house, but the idea that someone would comfortably pass up a salary around the 98th percentile of incomes in the country for like 2 days a month of work because they're "feeling burnt out" is unthinkable. Anyone sensible would hold onto that until they pried it out of one's cold dead hands; American tech salaries are almost literally unbelievable. Even moreso if we consider a maintainer in a poorer country.

> "I tweaked your questions a tiny bit to rephrase them as I interpreted them. I think the spirit of your questions was kept, I apologize if not"

I started writing Tan, but then changed it. A lot of your reply is assuming that we know there were malicious patches and suspect Jigar Kumar was a bad actor and that the big company would be somewhat US friendly. But we can't plan to know all that for all situations like this. Some people will be speculating that the previous paid maintainer was complicit and all their work and merges are now suspect. The billion dollar company who hired Collins in this hypothetical maintainer could be Baidu or Yandex or Saudi Aramco, and then people would be suspicious. It's one thing to have your task be "don't make people mad" but doesn't that change if people getting mad can give you unbounded retrospective work and responsibility?

> "If these tasks fall under the "don't make everyone mad" job responsibility, then yes. [...] Was there actually a real maintenance issue? [...] Or, the community could raise the problem to Big Company, who can do the work of verifying that there is a problem and working with the maintainer to resolve it."

As soon as the internet becomes aware that they can get anything merged ASAP by threatening to get mad, everyone will be mad about everything all the time. Whom at the BigCo will do the work of verifying whether there is a problem? I mean, let's put Lasse Collins on a specific team along with other employees who are expected to work 40-80 hour weeks while he isn't. The pressure on the team manager to ditch the maintainer and distribute his salary among the other team members would be constant. If those other team members see him doing less work for similar or more money it would be a morale killer and they would want to leave. If they also have to know his project well enough to follow all the drama and things people are complaining about and tease out what is and isn't a real problem and coerce him to do his job, sorry 'work with him', well, they won't be very motivated to do that.