I had the same naive thought today.

Perhaps Dropbox will open source the project and the community can keep developing features and maintaining it.

It doesn't matter how much you are going to pay, someone paid more (Dropbox) and now they want exclusivity on the garbage can they are going to put this in.

I would love to see more companies shutting down services open sourcing them, but it's a lot of work and once you decide to shut something down you want to also cut the losses.

"Will Mailbox be open-sourced?

Unfortunately not. We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, but this is ultimately not something we will support."

https://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/

I use Mailbox but I already pay €9.99 for Dropbox so I already felt like I was paying for it.

When mailbox goes, I'll probably drop my dropbox subscription as well.

Mailbox is not an open source project you can just throw money at to keep alive.

But, it's potentially possible to crowdfund an "FNAC" acquired app to demonstrate profitability of continuing support rather than irrationally throwing money and goodwill away. Goodwill, once lost, is seldom recovered... damaging the parent company.

+1