Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users, which ultimately comes from building a good product.
Trust comes from the publisher/author being truthful and honest with users, nothing else. By publishing source code, an open source software publisher is making a strong statement towards trust: you can see everything. Nothing is hidden (this is not true though when a company uses an open source client and closed source back end strategy).
> There's a litany of open source projects that I have used that have been completely abandoned.
There's also a litany of abandoned closed source commercial software and SaaS products. Keeping commercial software alive requires money. Keeping open source alive requires time. In the end, both are scarce and the author/publisher has to make a decision on what to invest in, and sometimes the software they sold to me last year doesn't get that investment. If it did, I'd still be using NBI Legacy to write documents, I'd be running OS/2, Microsoft Bob would be helping users make Windows work, and I could read news with Google Reader (aside Bob, all of these were at least good products. Bob was... ahead if it's time).
What trust is seeing how a product has evolved over 5-10 years.
I think you’re missing my point. My point is focusing on whether a project is open source is relatively meaningless. It’s like using the price at a restaurant to judge the quality of food… it’s almost meaningless.
The public good still exists no matter what people in business think. It just takes awhile to effect your bottom line if you ignore it.
Yes, but being able to continue using, and even fixing bugs in the abandoned project is way, way better than having a useless pile of bits because the license server was taken offline. If may not be a great situation and you may well want to migrate to something else, but it is a far more graceful exit than closed-source software usually is.
> Trust comes from building a healthy ecosystem of users, which ultimately comes from building a good product.
This isn't enough. Great products with many users are often acquired and shut down or just change their licensing strategy to be unsuitable (either too expensive or too restrictive).