It was also completely rewritten. It kind of boggles the mind. They didn't keep any of the branding or any of the code. What exactly did they buy? Users?

I rewrote some parts for scalability in the first couple years after the acquisition, and a lot was changed after I left. But I believe a lot of it is still there 15 years later. Perhaps a current maintainer could elaborate?

Many codebases end up pretty different after 15 years. It doesn't mean the original codebase wasn't a useful starting point. It's lower risk to adapt and improve based on customer feedback than figure out, "what should a build-your-own e-commerce tool do?" in the first place.

Thanks for that, the little I had read about it gave me a much different impression of a complete rewrite to move away from lisp.

What language was your re-write done in?

Again, there was no complete re-write. It remained a mix of Lisp, Perl5 and C++.

Cool, thanks for answering. I wonder how many languages Yahoo currently uses. Given how many acquisitions they have done over the years.

Who devised RTML?

pg.

Paying users. That's something very valuable. The fact that is still running says a lot about the product.

That's exactly what they bought. These days you can clone a lot of sites that exist out there (HN or reddit are great examples) but you wont get anywhere without the community