gorhill stopped doing uBlock and passed it to others, who subsequently took it in a direction he didn’t like, so that he resumed maintenance under the name uBlock Origin (since the name “uBlock” had been transferred).
So this time when he stops maintaining a project, he’s avoiding the same thing happening.
The wiki link somewhat explains the situation but to reiterate it for HN: gorhill no longer wanted to work on uBlock full time so he transferred the project to chrisaljoudi who immediately registered ublock.org in order to solicit donations under the valuable uBlock branding. Development on uBlock all but stopped and the project died, some 3 years later chrisaljoudi sold the project to AdBlock who are essentially an advertising company. Meanwhile gorhill continued development at a slower pace on his personal fork, uBlock Origin, which is still maintained to this day.
So if 'squatting' the name of your own OSS project is considered 'user hostile' then let this be a lesson to people considering giving up their project: the person you give it to may abuse your trust and the trust of the community in order to further their own agenda, in this situation it was all just pretty harmless petty drama but it might not always work out so well.
Random Github projects aren't organisations with funding and staff with rules and responsibilities to keep the project running, it's okay to archive the project and let the community decide what to do, giving the project to the first person who asks may end up achieving the same thing as archiving the project or it may come back to bite you in the arse damaging your reputation in the process.
@gorhill explains this in a Reddit post from a month ago:
> I will never hand over development to whoever, I had my lesson in the past -- I wouldn't like that someone would turn the project into something I never intended it to become (monetization, feature bloat, etc.). At most I would archive the project and whoever is free to fork under a new name. For now I resisted doing this, so people will have to be patient for new stable release.
gorhill stopped doing uBlock and passed it to others, who subsequently took it in a direction he didn’t like, so that he resumed maintenance under the name uBlock Origin (since the name “uBlock” had been transferred).
So this time when he stops maintaining a project, he’s avoiding the same thing happening.