<https://launchpad.net/mysql> says that MySQL's maintainer is Sun/MySQL Engineering. That's true.
<https://launchpad.net/zope> says that Zope's maintainer is Zope Administrators. That's true.
<https://launchpad.net/mozilla> says that Mozilla's maintainer is me. That's false: the real maintainer is the Mozilla Foundation.
<https://launchpad.net/gnome> says that Gnome's maintainer is Registry Administrators. That's false: the real maintainer is the Gnome Foundation.
<https://launchpad.net/kde> says that KDE's maintainer is Jonathan Riddell. As far as I know, that's false too: the real maintainer is KDE e.V.
The pattern here seems to be that the maintainer is correct for project groups that use Launchpad, and incorrect for project groups that don't.
I suggest that Launchpad should record (if it doesn't already) whether a project group uses Launchpad; and that if a project group doesn't use Launchpad, Launchpad shouldn't claim to know who its maintainer is.
The problem here is our data model only has one property for project registration and ownership. That attribute is called 'owner'. It is displayed in different contexts as 'owner', 'registrant', and 'maintainer'. If a single piece of data is asked to represent three distinct concepts it will often be inaccurate.
The Gnome example you cite shows that it is owned by the 'registry admins' a group whose purpose is to register projects in Lanchpad and then turn them over to their rightful owners. They have done that for Gnome but it looks like no one from the Gnome Foundation has claimed ownership.
My proposal to fix this and related bugs is to change our data model to have the following attributes:
* registrant - the person who originally registered the project or project group. It is immutable, non-null and is set at registration time.
When this field is added the registrant will be set to the same value as the owner for existing projects.
* owner - the person or team who currently owns the project. The current owner or a Launchpad admin can reassign ownership to another person or team at any time. Upon creation it is set to the registrant.