[dragosbulugean]

I've heard these arguments before and they sound good in theory, however in real life I haven't seen it work that way.

Projects dying off depends on developing a revenue stream or being backed by some company with a real revenue stream. Never solely about being open source. I have another comment about this when I talk about Lazarus below.

Being cross-platform sounds great in theory. However, most users don't use multiple OSes. Also, being cross-platform is extremely hard... for early-stage software you're better off making it work well on one platform, then extending when you achieve some traction with users. Being cross-platform with one tech also removes the chances of benefitting of platform specific APIs that might make it work better.

Lazarus, while I find it easy to get enthusiastic about, I'm old enough to have gone through a couple of cycles. The reason Electron with all its issues (memory consumption, app size) is winning is because there's a mass of developers that know how to build apps with HTML/JS/CSS. Like Haskell or OCaml or other awesome languages, if there's no mass of people that can contribute, the ecosystem never takes off — and ecosystem is the main trait of languages taking off. This is why an OSS project written in Lazarus using some relatively unknown UI APIs is unlikely to survive — I hope it does though.