@Ben Huson - Not had to use snail mail yet, but damnit, I care. ;)

As for Github, I often find exactly the opposite. It is *frequent* that I run across some project on Github that is a clone of a clone of a clone of a badly made clone, and finding out the original project is an unbelievable exercise in frustration. Git's very nature of "copy the repo" only really exacerbates the nature of this sort of thing, which is annoying in any open source project to start with.

Forking of plugins doesn't happen often enough to be a particular issue, since most plugins that people would want to fork are supported well enough by the plugin author that they accept patches and such. It's pretty rare that we get asked to take a plugin over. As I told Jeff, I can only think of like 5 or 6 times that this has occurred.