> It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available…The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves.

It does matter: popular products have been forked or the open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the former was FOSS and it’s a “drop-in binary replacement”, I’m sure they looked at the code for reference…)

If your environment doesn’t have API changes and vulnerabilities, forking requires practically zero effort. If it does, the alternative to maintaining yourself or convincing someone to maintain it for you (e.g. with donations), is having the original maintainers keep working for free.

Although this specific product may be mostly closed source (they’ve had commercial addons before the announcement). If so, the problem here is thinking it was open in the first place.

I thought Valkey was the blessed fork of Redis. Is Redict better in some way?

To be clear, colima isn't a fork of docker. It's just the lima VM with the docker OCI runtime + cli which is FOSS and always has been. Docker Desktop is the pile of garbage you can kinda sorta replace it with, but PodMan and PodMan Desktop is closer to a clone of Docker than Colima. Colima _is_ Docker