> But surely the odds of a project's long-term viability increase if the community has the option of continuing the project, right?

I agree with this, but not the following:

> Clearly, if the project is not open-sourced, then its odds of outliving its original author's interest are obviously stuck at 0%.

Because, while the author's interest flagging doesn't necessarily mean a closed-source project is dead, the author could transfer it (open-sourcing could be considered an example, but it could also be sold when they tire of it.)

But with closed source, there is a risk that a time will come, either through neglect or active decision, where development will stop and others will be legally denied the right to take up the maintenance of the system, whereas with open source, the right of interested outside parties to take over is, insofar as this is possible, guaranteed.

markdown uses words wrapped in single asterisks for italics. You're using bbcode.

    *this will be italics*

produces:

this will be italics

Hacker News does not support markdown. It supports just italics with asterisks, blank lines for paragraphs, code blocks by indenting with two spaces (while markdown uses 4), and auto-linking URLs. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc