Vanishing Faces of GNU/Linux
It's very hard to kill projects as long as people care about them
GNU/Linux is not "owned" by any company. Sure, the copyrights have names (of people/projects) associated with them. There is copyright assignment, but that's not applied in the same way as when dealing with proprietary software. A project like Debian and KDE, for instance, can be forked by anybody. People come and go. Anybody can join in (well, provided one has the "correct" politics). That generally means the projects live on, irrespective of the finances of any one company.
Let's take KDE for example. It'll turn 30 on 14 October 2026, i.e. just over a year from now.
Who runs KDE? Matthias Ettrich does not seem involved anymore. Over the years the project had different boards and perceived leaderships. Consider Aaron Seigo (not been seen much online this past half a decade, even over a decade; 2 decades ago he was like the "public face" of KDE). Consider instead the KDE e.V. Board and its board of directors:
There are familiar faces in there, including Eike Hein, who was already involved 2 decades ago, unlike Nate Graham, who a decade ago was still an Apple fan. Adriaan de Groot has been in "the scene" since the 90s. He's more of a BSD person, but he works on installers too.
However, so many KDE contributors from 20 years ago aren't heard of anymore. Sebastian Trueg for example.
Uri Herrera is still around, he made his own distro, and the KDE community seems to have several sub-communities.
Speaking of distros, Adam Dymitruk (KDE Neon) is still active/vocal online, but hardly visible in KDE, Plasma etc. His visibility goes back to the bygone era of "cloud", "IoT", and "Web3".
Just as people hardly hear of Miguel de Icaza in relation to GNOME these days, many of the "old faces" of KDE aren't so visible anymore. That serves to show how many other Free software projects generally work. They take a life of their own and people come onboard while others "move on".
Again, unlike proprietary software, Free software projects do not depend on any one person or company to still exist.
This is an alluring trait and selling point. Adoption risks are lowered. █