[kevincox]

> There's a litany of open source projects that I have used that have been completely abandoned.

Yes, but being able to continue using, and even fixing bugs in the abandoned project is way, way better than having a useless pile of bits because the license server was taken offline. If may not be a great situation and you may well want to migrate to something else, but it is a far more graceful exit than closed-source software usually is.

> Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users, which ultimately comes from building a good product.

This isn't enough. Great products with many users are often acquired and shut down or just change their licensing strategy to be unsuitable (either too expensive or too restrictive).