I created Crunchbase within TC. It goes down all the time because every dev TC had has left, most of us prior to the acquisition. I believe there is a single person there atm looking after everything, and the mixed environment (RoR for CB, PHP for the rest) doesn't help.

Nothing has been added to CB since I left - because I assume that the dev who is there is now stuck in the trap of administering what is there and not having the time to do development. CB is also hosted separately, and while it does go down, it just needs some TLC and a cleanup.

There is no way they will hand it over. It is worth far too much. They just needed a kick in the butt to get it back in order. CB ranks far too well on startup terms, has a lot of its own traffic, and is probably worth $10M+ on its own.

If you are a RoR dev and want to work on CrunchBase, I suggest you ping them (note I have no idea what the situation there is atm)

On the other hand, there is a legacy in my decision to make the API unrestricted and just simple json output. So CB can never disappear or be controlled. An application can get to the data as easily as a user can. The license is also super-liberal, all that is required to use the data is attribution (it's CC-Attribution). If you are ever implementing an API for an important community resource I suggest you do the same and forget API keys and all that.