today i was reminded of hastebin for some reason.
for context: hastebin.com was a site hosting the open source hastebin software to temporarily store text. it was very simple: you paste your text and then you save it. it could then be shared with anyone.
few years later it got acquired by toptal and the service went to the shitters but i digress…
how can an open source project just be acquired by someone like toptal? i know there tend to be central leaders on open source projects (which can be passed onto others) and hosting services can be costly but i figured due to the nature of open source that it is harder to take over a project…
yes i know forking is an option and that people did do that but still. under the stewardship of toptal from what ive seen the project went quite in the gutters and i havent heard of hastebin in years…
I mean in your example it wasnt the software that was bought, but the website no? If most of the project revolves around a single site that uses the software then this is inevitable.
If nobody is willing to take over the maintenance of a fork, then thats just what happens. Its not like there is a deadline to this tho. Anyone could still just fork the codebase of a project that went to shit 10 years ago and start maintaining it again.
If people are willing to work on a project for free thats cool, but without any donations it will often be too much. To get donations you need a central, well known platform that represents the entire project. This is hard to do for a fork, because potential donators would initially have to trust complete strangers to not just abandon the project again right away.