The problems are forks, though. Anybody can create a copy and the problem is that e.g. on Github there are tons of library clones that aren't even marked as fork, because they have been cloned and then imported as a new library for whatever reason by the new maintainer. I've often had substantial troubles finding the original library or the most well-maintained fork.

Large repos like Github should do an automated similarity search and prominently display potential older (as in creation date) versions of the same library even if they are not forked from the original repo directly.