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This is often the case with this "free" software. Most of the time, people are doing it in the spare time, however frequently the unemployed (i.e., recent grad students) are doing it to play in the sandbox and to get their resumes out there.
This is a risk with ANY software, not just the free stuff. Look at all the people who were using OfficeVision! How about all the people who were running HP-UX on their HP3000 servers?
My experience has been that commercial software is discontinued far more often than free software. FAR more often. why? Because as soon as the management of a company decides that the software isn't profitable, they drop it. They don't care too much about existing users, all they care about is their income.
With free software, this isn't a problem. People distribute it because they enjoy it, and so it doesn't have to be profitable. Frequently, it's kept around long after it makes sense to keep it around, simple because it doesn't cost anything to maintain.
Even better is open source software, which is usually free, and you get the source code. Because there aren't restrictions on who can host it or who can change it, the original developers can stop working on it, and you're still not left in the lurch. Even if nobody is developing it, if you find it valuable, you can keep using it and make any enhancements yourself if you really need to.
I don't know how many times I've had to re-do an application because the commercial software vendor got bought by a larger one that discontinued the original product, or when a commercial software vendor discontinued a product simply because they didn't think it was profitable or had a future.
However, I've never once had a system that had to be re-done because free software was discontinued. And, I use free software a lot.
As for HPWF, it's absurd to complain about the fact that nobody is developing it. It has never reached a point where it was useful software, the only people who have used it are developers who were in the process of writing it. Nobody is left in the lurch with HPWF.
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