Even an acquisition[1] of PhantomJS would totally make sense, then let him keep working on it but based on headless Chrome and with real resources.
[1] Careful how you spin it for this route, learn from TJ/Express https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/strongloop-express-40b8bcb...
So if an open source project is being sold:
- Make sure everyone knows it's because it'll be better handled and not because of the money.
- At least get a decent amount of money! According to TJ it was half a month worth of money.
- If you are the company buying it don't leave it unattended afterwards.
Anyway, now TJ is surely remembered with a lot of gratitude in the Node.js community and I'm so happy he helped it grow so much!
This is all better explained here (and read the comments for TJ opinion): http://thefullstack.xyz/history-express-javascript-framework...
I played around with PhantomJS for something at my current job - it ultimately didn't work out for us (and we went a different route), but it was interesting and fun to learn about.