Abandoned or not, the add-on belongs to the person who created it and cannot be taken over by someone else unless the author explicitly transfers it or makes it open source.
Well if I own a thing and I leave it alone for a number of months/year without replying after people tried to contact me several time for several months... I can't blame some one to take over on it. Of course if I reply saying:"No!", it's a different thing.
As a developer I would probably find it easier and quicker to just re-write it from scratch.
The problem
@Chris D is that we are not all devs and there's 100 rows addons but also 6000 rows addons!
Example:
a paid add-on is no longer compatibile with 1.5.3... and the author abandoned it. A licensee ask another devs to patch it to support xf 1.5.3 and then make the patch publicly available. it can be a problem without the author consent? (because the author don't respond anymore)
and to add features? (probably with the need to redistribute the whole package)
ok, understood, too much complicated situations... but with many "solo developers" this situations can happen.
p.s. I need to become a developer! (If Chris ever liked this post will be only referred to this row)
