>there was no interest in helping out the project.
They saw that people were filing issues and making pull requests and that those people were getting total radio silence. I can understand how someone might think "well, people are already trying to 'help the project' and the maintainer isn't even acknowledging it, so it's a waste of time".
And while again I totally understand and agree that they should have tried to contact you, you've known about the removal for like 9 months and you apparently never reached out to them either? Like, a couple words in reply to a bugzilla or an IRC message does not amount to picking a fight with a company.
I am sure they made a sound business decision, and I think as a result of that I made the right personal decision. And here we are now having this meta-discussion with people not having a clue. Welcome !
You seem to imply there was no communication, and I stopped the project out of the blue. That is a misrepresentation.
Nobody stepped up to take over maintainership, and I don't see anyone doing that now. But if someone wants to try, I can unarchive the project and restore the PRs and issues.
If not, the king is dead, long live the king!
What they should have done is tried to reach out to you before forking.
They included in RHEL and sold it as part of their product when it suited them, and now they have replaced it because it suited them. That's fine, I don't have to agree.
The decision to do this was made before June 2018, 18 months after the last activity. One of the reasons cited was lack of activity, but that is no thanks to them, I guess.
That is why I am convinced the goal was to replace it from the onset, there was no interest in helping out the project. In fact "no activity" was the right excuse to make their action seem legitimate. Attempting to contact the project could have jeopardized that plan.
They could have just removed "dstat" from the distribution, and added a note that users can now use pcp-dstat. But now they made it impossible for users to add the original dstat. Let alone the support nightmare of having a different tool with the same name. There's no winning this one.