I would also be interested in understanding whether there is a proper pricing model for such things. Wordle comes to mind. Or a friend that has an IPad app that took 2 years to build that is something novel but not released. Some projects are open-source and some aren't. Some are acquired for users and some are acqui-hired for continued development. Any interesting advice or links here for folks that don't want to be founders but want to make a solid chunk of cash, have an expertise of value and love the development work.
There's not any real pricing model that I know of. I think it comes down to a question of what value an acquisition brings and that's always kinda fuzzy. If you want specific numbers, the project was at ~5k GitHub stars at the time of acquisition so I guess it's a hundred bucks per star. :)
I've been valuing my GitHub stars at $0. I think there are a lot of open source authors who would be happy to "sell" their project for $100/star while getting a salary to continue development under an open license. Litestream is a well-suited project for fly.io, and there's a missing factor here I still don't understand. Anyway, congratulations!
That actually totally checks out as a Fermi estimation. If you think of starring as developers marking a library that has brought them value, if they starred it, it's probably saved them an hour or so in the long run. So one benny* per star totally checks out.
* Ben Franklin, not Ben Johnson, lol, pun not intended
