we should invite people to fix/fork or adopt existing projects and use licenses that incentive doing that for profit (like MIT, BSD, CC0 etc).
Reviving poorly maintained software is a massive headache though! I've done it. Took me 1.5 year of full time work as the new maintainer and a varying set of 4-6 collaborators during that time, willing to spend some time on it too, to remove tech debt / quirks / upstream dependency API changes... The reason I did that was because this software still had a ton of active users and building from scratch and then offering migration would have been even more costly.
However, I would not do it again. Or at least not pick up something that has been shelved for nearly 2 years.
Reviving poorly maintained software is a massive headache though! I've done it. Took me 1.5 year of full time work as the new maintainer and a varying set of 4-6 collaborators during that time, willing to spend some time on it too, to remove tech debt / quirks / upstream dependency API changes... The reason I did that was because this software still had a ton of active users and building from scratch and then offering migration would have been even more costly.
However, I would not do it again. Or at least not pick up something that has been shelved for nearly 2 years.