Keeping Development Going on Social Products

I’ve seen a lot of great products go downhill because the author cannot keep up with development. I wish some of these authors would embrace the world of opensource and let others work on their code. Seriously, why else would they start a project?

I can see someone wanting to get paid for a project. I think my first guess is that these people are waiting for someone or a company to buyout the project or waiting for people to start paying for it. I can completely understand this as I believe people should get paid for their hard work. But why don’t these developers say anything about it?

There are some products out there that would be great for social networking and blogging that really need to be updated and no one is working on them. Do we ask the developers to open the code? I’m sure we all can give donations, but is that enough? Many of these guys are programmers with jobs other than creating free plugins. So, how do we keep them developing and upgrading?