These are amazing efforts. I wish they would open source Firefox Send, I would love to continue the project. Let someone else take it over.
Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, then when the donor got what they needed from the project, ended the funding?
> Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor,
Uhm, that's not the impression I got, as a total outsider. Things like FFSend or FFNotes were thought up as extensions to the browser model; others were attempts to cook up de-facto web standards (Persona, deuxdrop); others were just moonshots (FFOS).
In the early years, Netscape's needs definitely played a large part; after they got the Google money, though, they've mostly done things "because they could".
The costs of running a Send server probably exceed those of its source code alone, which makes it a tricky proposition to say "here's the source code" alone. I'm not familiar myself, but I imagine it looks the same as any other public non-P2P file sharing service:
Many of these projects seem like they may have been funded by a specific donor, then when the donor got what they needed from the project, ended the funding?