The original author and main developer, Dave Reveman, started working on other projects for Novell (Silverlight, etc.), then joined Google, where he worked on C

The original author and main developer, Dave Reveman, started working on other projects for Novell (Silverlight, etc.), then joined Google, where he worked on ChromeOS compositing (obviously) and, more recently, on Crostini. He's a really crazy dude, even outside of computing. With Novell out of the picture, IIRC the project was forked, rewritten and merged a couple of times. Canonical ended up driving most of the development since. Last time I tried it, a year or two ago, it still had those cracktastic special effects, e.g. the flames circling the pointer when you activate the "Show mouse" shortcut.