That is not dead which may eternal lie, and in strange aeons even death may die. Remember that weird language that looked like Java and was used by nobody except script kiddies until the Web exploded? Or that quirky little language with forced indentation that was overshadowed by Perl and Matlab well into the 90s and the 00s? Open source projects don't have the same constraints as commercial ones, they can remain dormant or unnoticed for years before suddenly taking off.