The developer, Raymond Hill had this to say on reddit a month ago:
I will never hand over development to whoever, I had my lesson in the past -- I wouldn't like that someone would turn the project into something I never intended it to become (monetization, feature bloat, etc.). At most I would archive the project and whoever is free to fork under a new name. For now I resisted doing this, so people will have to be patient for new stable release.
What would actually help is that people help to completely investigate existing issues instead of keep asking me to add yet more features. Turns out people willing to step in the code to investigate and pinpoint exactly where is an issue (or that there is no issue) is incredibly rare.
Presumably referring to the mess that happened with uBlock when he tried to step away. That's why it's called "uBlock Origin" now; the original name was taken over by someone who then developed it in ways against Gorhill's intentions.
it was taken over by the same people behind "AdBlockPlus" which is a shakedown operation. They're allowing ads to be unblocked if advertisers pay them money.
The developers running it should be able to accept monies from the users of the product, especially donations. They have built something and are keeping the end users interests at heart while evolving the capability. It needs to be sustainable, else the intrinsic motivation will dry up.
The adblockplus model is extortion. They're not incentivized to serve the end user well, especially when their primary source of revenue is the advertisers the users are attempting to block.
The problem was that the person was essentially squatting on the name (in spirit; the name had been legitimately transferred) to gather donations for himself while not actively developing it. Then he sold it to the "Acceptable Ads" people.
It's strange that this is so prevalent in the industry. Who ever got promoted for fixing all the hard bugs? Reinventing the wheel is the safe career move in many companies. And the result are huge R&D budgets, bugs and a bad user experience.
To be fair, a rewrite from scratch can be justified in many situations, e.g. out of support stack that is hard to hire for or a change of direction where a lot of bespoke code was written and now a one size fits all is used, thus leaving a lot of redundant and interlinked code.
Rarely are those potential reasons actually weighted up against the full cost of the rewrite
But for it to work well the rewrite should be done by someone that understands the current system, not as a way to avoid understanding the current system.
I will never hand over development to whoever, I had my lesson in the past -- I wouldn't like that someone would turn the project into something I never intended it to become (monetization, feature bloat, etc.). At most I would archive the project and whoever is free to fork under a new name. For now I resisted doing this, so people will have to be patient for new stable release.
What would actually help is that people help to completely investigate existing issues instead of keep asking me to add yet more features. Turns out people willing to step in the code to investigate and pinpoint exactly where is an issue (or that there is no issue) is incredibly rare.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/i240ds/reques...