So, how is a tool/vendor being bought by a bigger company, then getting killed off any different from an abandoned open source product?

>My preference is tools from small shops where the tool is their main product, their bread and butter. That becomes a trouble only if a few years later the vendor gets bought by someone big... as it happened to Fox :).
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>Next good source is the open source. It won't get killed by some corporate bean counters, and if a few years down the road it gets abandoned, you can see it way ahead - by the frequency of updates decreasing, for one. And even then, the last stable version is still out there, and if you really need it you have the source. More important, when you google your questions, it doesn't find sales pitch articles, just the technical stuff. Which saves a lot of time.