As I know, very large fraction of Open Source project made without any plan at all. Many, just for fun, some, for marketing reasons (as point to show in CV or

As I know, very large fraction of Open Source project made without any plan at all. Many, just for fun, some, for marketing reasons (as point to show in CV or some outsource companies does them to show how they code). So, when fun ended, those projects become orphans. Very few projects are in reality, daughters of big corporations (or Non Government Organizations, for charity), or just community version of some commercial project - they sure have some business plan of their future operations. But I think share of such projects less than 10%. For about donations decision, I mostly see two opposite considerations: 1) "I will only pay to big charity organization, because I see there strong bureaucracy culture, which will not allow them to just steal money"; 2) "I will NOT pay to big bureaucracy organization, because I see there large costs spent to just this bureaucracy, not to work, so I'll pay to separate people or to small organization, where I see working people and don't see bureaucracy". And for about continuity, I think, for most projects enough to choose right license, I think the best is MIT/BSD, because it allow to easy make clone and even to make commercial clone, while GPL made cloning very complicated. So, if your project have MIT/BSD (or similar) license, you don't need to think much about continuity - anybody could take your project and keep it going if need. But if you choose GPL or similar, you MUST take care about continuity.