Thanks Dan for feeding the brainstorm.
I admit the "2 years rule" was a bit out of range, and I understand how it could be hard for well-willing moodle fellows to make such projection. I still am wondering how to get anyway a way to ensure some kind of guarantee over time. I do not have so many ideas on the subject, but also know it is a real caveheat for administrators.
Many Moodle admins are more "global" system information admins, and are not "full moodler" (or moodle fool... ). So unstability over time might be really a source of insecurity for them. They have surely plenty to do elsewhere, and will focus on other management problems so discovering a misbehaviour in old code might be very upsetting.
The idea of support "guarantee" was that a module should always be linked to an "active developper", maybe not the original one. The idea that could be smoother for avoiding so long commitment could be that we might allow registering a team of developers as potentially being able to ensure some kind of service on the fly. The idea could be to just being able to know who has known technical skill to check a little incompatibility point.
Generally, a common code inspection (what we use to do when evaluating the consistance of a contributive plugin for our own use) is quite enough to get an operative knowledge of a module, specially for daily moodle developers. So would it maybe not so hard to have a list of potentially concerned people.
Following that track, we could now avoid the 2 years commitment, and smoothing it to just "update your unavailability" when leaving the party. Maybe could we even have a way to raise a flag saying "I cannot continue with that plugin (reasons are mine... and not worth to be said), I would like to release that to other people !! who joins ?".
I do not ensure that there would candidates on all stuff. We know how little enthousiasm there was on a so huge and tricky module as Scorm, but I'm just thinking out loud.
Cheers fellows ! and a huge ton of regards to all San Francisco MoodleMooters !!
PS : So interesting that idea of having a checklist form for checking "featuring" items. How could we practically set that kind of service up ?