Your last sentence reminded me of an interview with the Ton Rosendaal, the creator of Blender. He talks extensively about how Blender became OSS and not abandonware. I highly encourage to watch the whole interview (you need at least 5 mins to get used to his accent), but the important part starts around minute 14
> Open-source projects never die
They do kind of die. Most of them, when the founder quits, the project just remains in github (etc) forever, not exactly dead but not alive either.
I am really in favor of companies that go out of business or products that quit open sourcing their software. I mean; all the popular Google products that were pulled, like Inbox, Rss reader and whatever more; why the hell didn't they open source those. I know ; probably something something legal, but that is a total waste.
I guess most companies, even after going out of business, will never do this.
What about when business fails though? Open-source projects never die; see the forks and reused knowledge in projects such as ffmpeg, libav, iPodLinux, Rockbox. For archiving purposes, open-source is tremendous.
I wish another kind of license were available, where software remains commercial until the company closes down, but then becomes OSS rather than abandonware.