No, Cloudflare did not acquire Sandstorm, but four of the seven team members (including both founders) are joining as individuals. This was our preference -- I love Cloudflare but I'd also like Sandstorm to remain independent.

Sorry, I meant for that to be clear in the post but I guess I failed.

It's ok. That's why I asked. I've seen acquisition announcements worded the same way so I just wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. Thanks for the clarity!

If you're running a founder-team-only private company without any real assets, the company only really "exists" for as long as the founders can be considered to be its employees. So, if another company comes along and makes an offer to the people to hire them as individual employees—not a company, not even a gelled team, just individual offers—then the company-that-was just sort of ceases to exist, because it now has nobody working for it. I think that's more what happened here.

If the company sells off all its other assets, yes. But in this case, Sandstorm Development Group, Inc. owns copyright in the Sandstorm open source project and (I'd assume) continues to operate the hosted service.

This matters because Sandstorm Development Group, Inc. (and not Cloudflare!) has the ability to grant proprietary licenses to the Sandstorm codebase.

I suspect they intend to keep working on Sandstorm in their spare time (like most of us on here and our OSS side projects), but my have explicitly had their work contracts worded in such a way as that's allowable (or maybe Cloudflare is giving them x% of time to dedicate to it?)

I'm currently in the process of leaving my full time job to work on my OSS stuff full time again. It's a tough move because you do eventually run out of money if you can't get enough grants, donations or a following on Patreon. That's how I ended up back in a full time gig myself.