I don't know, I don't really spend time on seeing why a project dies, that seems entirely possible that projects after running out of a grant would not be successful if they have not somehow created a revenue stream. Open code never dies though. Even if no one picks up the project, it's that much more code to feed into the AI so the next devs can chatGPT their way to success. Opensource can never truly die or be useless once it is published.
Discussion
Yeah, but that leads to a bunch of thin clients and simple webscripts. Low investment, so that if it doesn't catch on, you can just walk away without a major loss.
I guess I'm just kinda lost as to what your point is 😅 mine is to defend what opensats is doing cause I think it's really cool and I saw what you said and thought maybe you hadn't seen the list of projects.
If you do the math, you'll see that the grants are not paid all that much. There is no secret cabal getting all the funds. (5 million / 100)
It's a good opportunity to work in opensource should anyone want to try. I encourage it. Don't be afraid of failure, and just go for it. A VC firm in silicon valley last I checked will only give you 50-80k and control your company from the start. There are very few jobs where you can be this open and work on this new of technology and try to bootstrap something.
I think also, it is an extremely difficult thing to do, given that grantees could easily get a job that pays far more and be stable and not have all the risks that come with making software that is trying to change the internet. So I applaud opensats for helping, I highly doubt nostr would have come this far without it.