On May 8, 2015, at 10:24 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> If a project is backed/picked up by a corporation, say Redhat or
> Oracle, or a foundation, say Apache or LibreOffice, then it may have a
> future more or less independent of any single individual or group.
Commercial software and company-backed F/OSS software gets abandoned all the time.
- OpenOffice may well die due to brain drain from LibreOffice. They’ve both got big corporate backers.
- The MySQL mailing list is getting a tiny fraction of the traffic it once enjoyed before the Oracle takeover; MySQL won’t go away any time soon for reasons of inertia, but MariaDB and NoSQL are surely taking large bites out of its user base.
- Remember ESD and aRTS? They’ve all but been killed off by PulseAudio. They were the “standard” of their time, backed by major Linux distributors.
- How many “standard” window managers has GNOME had over the years?
- How many desktop managers and GUI toolkits preceded GNOME/Gtk? NeWS, NeXTSTEP, CDE/Motif, Tk, all with big-name support in their day.
- Adobe’s killed off dozens of products over the years. FrameMaker, Director, Flash Builder, PageMaker, Contribute, Fireworks…
- Got a smartphone? How many apps have you bought that never went anywhere after they got your money? There’s more than one in my case, at least.
At least with F/OSS, you have the option of taking over maintainership of an abandoned code base. My company has done that a few times now, as it was easier to do that than switch to the abandoned package’s replacement.
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