The plan is to keep the project alive. But making Renoise open source won’t work IMHO.
Making Renoise open source would just kill it softly, because the Renoise codebase is so old (grown) and huge that no one on earth could be keen enough to dive into that pile of source code and make something useful out of it. Maybe some people will manage to tweak a few things here and there, but it’s extremely unlikely that someone or a bunch of people will take over the whole project and make some major changes.
To give you an idea of the size of this project. It’s ~ a million LoC. Yes, a million. It’s really a lot easier to start new projects than to tinker with other people’s old codebases.
Also, the only “big” open source projects I know of that have survived have always been built as open source software from the start. You can’t just take an old project and make it open source. That’s a great way to archive it, or allow people to copy and paste a few snippets out of it, but not to move it forward.
I do my best to devote as much time as possible to this project, as it’s still my favourite thing to do, and has kept me alive and happy for many, many years.
But I’m also involved in many other projects, yes, so I can’t promise anything - especially not a roadmap.
Renoise has never been made by a company trying to make a profit. It was built by people who put a lot of love and time into it because they love the project. And that is exactly what I wanted Renoise to be and nothing else.
At some times there were a lot of people, at other times almost no one but me. At the moment, there are only me and achenar as “active” members. This may change in near future or not. I honestly don’t know. But if you want to help and do something for Renoise. Just ask.
And if you are considering buying Renoise, but are unsure whether or not it will be updated in the future, buy it for what it is, not what it might be.