Comment by cantastoria

I think they made the right decision. I've seen way too many open source projects run by academics die a sudden death when the two or three professors that were maintaining them decide they didn't want to do it anymore (or retired). In my experience, most academics are using open source tools not because they are better or even "open" but because they are free. Few users (if any) ever contribute code back to the project beyond the occasional bug report making them essentially just as dependent on the core maintainers as they would be on any commercial company.