Not to mention the cases where the authors retire or are incapacitated. There is also the case of software that is not critical, but helpful to have and appreciably better than competing systems.

The software is fairly general-purpose, being used in software engineering, bioinformatics, network engineering and social networks, to name a few areas. I should also have noted that we're not just considering maintenance. The underlying field has a lot of work going on it. There are plenty of opportunities to develop new algorithms and provide new features.

Actually, I intend to continue to work on it after retiring, but at some time illness, death or some such personal this is going to get involved. It would be nice to have new people involved before then. Also, when the last of us has left the company, it will be difficult to convince the company to continue hosting the web site.

The software came out of the Research organization which at the time had a wide mandate. As there was no interest within the company of capitalizing on it, we were able to get it released as open source (currently, with the Eclipse license). As the software provided a platform for our research, work on it was encouraged. Of late, the company has greatly curtailed research, firing many and convincing many others to leave voluntarily, and restricting work to a few areas. We have moved the code base to GitHub but have kept the web site on its current machine until we decide what to do. As with most companies, managers can be touchy about employees airing concerns publicly.