Open source, mostly defined by the right to fork, is a prerequisite for the survival of abandoned projects. You can say that abandoned open-source projects don&#x27;t necessarily survive, but for proprietary projects abandonment is a guaranteed death sentence.<p>I&#x27;ve also started to resent the word &quot;hacker&quot;, because it sounds as some kind of social class made up of special snowflakes. If the project has value and users, then interested programmers will find a way to keep the project going and there are hundreds of projects in the Linux ecosystem that survive because of volunteers or companies scratching an itch. If there isn&#x27;t interest, then surely the project might as well die. But that&#x27;s a tautology.