Opinion on taking over plugin development

Here’s the deal. A plugin I use, as do a lot of other people hasn’t been updated in months by the original developer. It sort of works for WP 2.1 and it sort of doesn’t. There doesn’t seem to be any energy around fixing it on the developers part and a couple of emails both inquiring about intentions and asking to take over it’s development & support have gone unanswered.

The delima is I’ve fixed a number of the issue for my own use and would like to make the plugin available to the masses. Since it started from yet another plugin anyway, and there hasn’t been any activity in months regarding it, is there any reason I can’t/shouldn’t do this?

There isn’t a whole lot of reason to rewrite the plugin as most of it works so it’s more updating it for 2.1 and releasing a fresh version so most of the original code would stay intact. What’s the proper way to maintain the credit history of what is done? I come from a nuke world and there we’d branch a module and just expand the existing credit history inside the module. Is it reasonable to assume the same in this case?

Anyway, any opinions would be appreciated.

Thanks
james
http://www.realitywired.com