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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

> Promising libraries potentially solving the above where abandoned by their maintainers, because it started as a special use case, or a free-time project.

> It is built by a company, reducing the likelihood of abandonment.

Even projects "built by a company" suffer the same fate. The only way to reduce the likelihood of abandonment is to tie a revenue stream directly to it, like customers paying for support or a pro version with additional features

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That's what we're doing: http://www.ory.am/sites/ - although there's obviously never the guarantee that a project is maintained. However, all of our other projects have been maintained for over two years.

Anyways, you're now one library richer, that solves a hard problem and we're committed to making it awesome.

Oh, and I almost forgot to say that. The editor is also used at serlo ( http://en.serlo.org/serlo ) which is the largest educational platform for germany with 1 million MAUs. So there's really little chance of this being discontinued over the next 4 years.

I've come to the conclusion that "All software is ultimately abandoned". Ours is a fast-changing industry. If software isn't abandoned, it probably should be. Its the oldest frameworks and languages that get the most criticism.

Big parts of the toolset I use every day are several decades old; if done correctly, software can be iterated and refined until it's of a very high quality. In my experience, it tends to stand a much greater chance the smaller it is (the best examples I'm thinking of are small unix command-line tools like find, grep).

Yet I resent every time I have to use grep, instead of a tool integrated with my IDE. Certainly those baroque old tools have their detractors too. That they survive so long (like vi and emacs) due to cults, not objective evaluation?

I use sublime text as my main editor, but I still need to use vi from time-to-time - e.g. when ssh'ing to a remote server. That's definitely an objective need, unless you can offer an alternative that is just as widely available.

De gustibus non disputandem.

I like grep... It does not do the same thing as Ctrl+F in my editor, but that's fine.

Yeah, I've gotten this response for my framework vs. a competing one from Mozilla. I usually reply "Mine came out a year before theirs and I still work on it all the time, and how 'bout that Shumway?"

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