Netzwelt easy collaboration or less collaboration

Lately I see a lot of repositories where the description reads “Unofficial fork of … Disclaimer: I am NOT the author…”

Do services such as GitHub also have a negative impact on the workings-together of software authors or is it just the new way of doing things?

The forkers try to cast off responsibility by adding such disclaimers, but:

• Why don’t people even bother to contact the original author?
• Or is it the author’s fault for not being reachable?
• Or should we just fork and forget?

/grumpy old man