> An example of this is Quicksilver on the Mac. It's considered to be one of the best Mac apps ever and the developer who made it, decided to open source it after he decided to take a job at Google. Quicksilver development fell apart afterwards.

I don't use a Mac, and don't even know what Quicksilver was until I checked, but this was posted 17 hours ago:

http://blog.qsapp.com/post/27644282840/ss69-release-quicksil...

Maybe development didn't follow at the same pace as before, but to say it "fell apart" when they are very close to releasing 1.0 seems not very accurate to this outside observer.

Much of what is left of Quicksilver today is about fixing bugs and keeping it on life support which is why I used the term "fell apart" instead of "dead". This was an app that the developer stopped programming for in 2006 and the bug fixing didn't really start until last year. Th plug-ins to other apps are part of what made Quicksilver great and most still don't work and haven't been updated since that time.

Sounds like a great idea for a kickstarter.

I'd still take "basic bugfixing and maintenance" over "gone completely" however.

I suppose in some sense it's a bit like owning a classic car, the warranty and support from the manufacturer is long since gone but there exists a community of owners and refurb businesses keeping it alive.

The difference with your car analogy is that the car doesn't stop working because other cars are adopting new technology or that the roads became worse. Quicksilver broke once Leopard was released.

After a long hiatus Quicksilver was taken over by a dedicated team of contributors who resumed active development[1]. Open-source worked after all, as this wouldn't be possible otherwise.

[1] http://blog.qsapp.com/

I realize that many Quicksilver fans will be upset with my comments but I can't rely on something that was essentially broken for five years and count on it being something I can use a couple of hundred times everyday.

What happens the next time something gets broken after a major OS update? I can't wait for a few months to get it working again.

I'm not saying that open source software is lousy. I use it all the time. It's just that in certain situations you need the person there who created it.

TextMate could act as a counterexample showing that the original author being fully in charge doesn't guarantee anything.

Another example was VisualHub, a Mac front-end for ffmpeg video conversion. The author, Techspansion, EOL'd it in 2008 and released a "code dump" as open source. Someone tried to pick up the pieces and form an open-source version called FilmRedux, but it was last updated in 2009.

Techspansion, however, was a good citizen and when a Mac OS X Lion broke VisualHub, he released a patched binary, so I'm still able to use VisualHub four years after it was EOL'd! :)

http://www.isquint.org/

Actually - Quicksilver development is alive and well. And I still use it in preference to Alfred et al.

To be fair in 2007 leopard's spotlight implemented the 20% of quicksilver's features that most users used 80% of the time.

You probably were a quicksilver poweruser, but I don't think there were many of you.

I don't think any Quicksilver user was anything other than a power user.

I currently use it, and I am not a power user. (But I'm just one datapoint)