Ehh... The support model is pretty tricky to make work. It doesn't scale well, and it creates somewhat of a conflict of interest: if you make your product work too well, people won't need support. It has worked a few times but there are a lot more failures than successes, sadly.

> Perfect, now another company can take a chance on raising VC funds for this or bankrolling it themselves.

Let's be honest: it would be nearly impossible for this to happen. If we couldn't get VCs to fund us, no VC is going to fund some other people -- who likely don't understand the codebase or the vision in anywhere near as much detail as we do -- to work on the same thing. Even with an extremely rational argument for why they'd be able to do better, the psychological barriers to investing in something that "already failed" are huge.

But if someone did try this, they should probably hire some people from the original team, I would think. :)

A more likely scenario is, if Sandstorm shows strong growth as an open source project to the point of being fundable again, then the original team (with maybe some added biz dev expertise) can restart the company in the future.