>> It's obvious to me that a corporation backed or foundation backed opensource project is always preferable to one lead by a single person that will sooner or later abandon the whole thing.

I've been working on a popular open source project for 3 years and I have no plans of stopping. There are only three conditions which would cause me to quit:

1. People stop using it.

2. I become physically/mentally incapacitated.

3. I die.

Also, I'm sure someone from the community would step up and take over of the project if I got hit by a bus.

I think that there is no correlation (single person vs corporation); there are pros and cons in both cases. Hapi was backed by Walmart Labs (corporation). SailsJS started running into issues with their community precisely when things started to get commercial.

I think that a lot of popular 'single person' (started by a single person) projects might actually last longer because the original authors tend to feel more responsible to the people/companies who have entrusted them personally. Also, in the single-person scenario, the author might perceive 100 users as being a lot; while a corporation might think that 10K users is not a lot.

Small projects not backed by corporations are usually more tight-knit.