Well sure, from the same perspective, the way this usually works is someone will take over the project -- whoever "needs it the most when they discover an issue" -- and so it's not necessarily anyone's problem. That is, after all, the somewhat selfish nature of Open Source.

But I'd say this is a problem if one wants to ensure compatibility in Rubyland with other languages and processes on different environments, or that they're using the latest and most correct code for their situation.

This gets hairier if the gem forks on github, and you've multiple fixes in multiple branches ... Rubygems aren't really set up to deal with this. Bundler helps, though.