What if you do find a critical bug after you started using it, and there is no one around that can help you with it?

When you find no one paying for maintainance, then congratulations: you are the maintainer !

Agreed and upvote but it becomes a problem if the owner is unresponsive but still holding the main repository, domains, package repositories etc. Forking is possible but a very complicated, messy, hostile path and also a lot more work than just contributing a patch.

Forking is trivial and non-hostile. Is there a plumbing issue in your language where it is unreasonably difficult to wire other dependencies to your fork instead of the original?

If there are no updates, then even forking should be light overhead.

> a lot more work than just contributing a patch.

For you it is.

But for a maintainer, reviewing and accepting a pull request can still be a lot of work, especially if the code has been stable for a long time.

If you want an SLA on support, then pay for support. It's literally that simple.

This is a fantasy ... go offer some open source maintainer some money to implement something they don't want or care about and come back and tell us if it was simple. It may be in some cases where they are actively looking for that kind of work, but more than likely they will have no interest.

I would expect for many developers it is really only a matter of how much you are willing to pay. If they don't already do freelance work then that cost might reasonably be higher than what it would cost to hire someone else to implement it because of the extra tax paperwork and whatnot that they now need to deal with.

Of course there will be some maintainers who are simply not interesed or unable to offer paid support (e.g. due to their employer being a control freak) but that's ok. As others have pointed out, forking / maintaining out of tree patches (and providing them to others) is not inherently hostile.