> Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.
Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.
> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.
When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.
Taking over write isn't really hard. It is not a complex app. The core is the rich text edit control from Windows. Writing a comparable application from "scratch" using the controls isn't a huge task and there are plenty comparable programs.
(The full OLE capability needs a bit tweaking to get it working right, if one needs it)
Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.
> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.
When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile