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by rue 5265 days ago
Paid-for projects go under all the time. This is nothing particularly unique to open source except that with OSS, someone can actually take over.

People just couldn't be bothered to, and are now paying the price.

1 comments

Actually no, people don't just take their ball and go home like this in funded proprietary projects that aren't maintained by very small teams. If he was a paid for contributor, he would have handed off the domain no question. Because it wouldn't have been his to keep in the first place, it would have belonged to the project collective.

Smaller proprietary get shut down and money dries up, but nobody simply throws a wrench into the machine quite like up and leaving a project but taking project resources with you like that. It simply doesn't happen outside of the open source community, and it is a unique problem. Branding it as a simple shutdown is also glossing over the problem.