I do not know that truespace is gone though, they just aren't supporting it. Microsoft will either resurrect it when they see a need (profit) or they are trying to sell it. Most likely Ormandys latest post is a call for buyers.
I doubt that MS will resurrect trueSpace or sell it. That is just not how MS works. Secondly, trueSpace and its code belongs to MS, so Roman is not looking for a buyer.
What MS typically does is purchase a property like trueSpace because there is something from the app that they want for their own purposes. It could be a little piece of code, for all we know. If they can make additional money from the product itself, that's great. If not, then they tank the product.
As an example, several years ago there was a fantastic vector program called Expression made by a company called Creature House. This vector program was very advanced and, in some ways, had features that made Illustrator look silly. Even more importantly, Creature House was working on a vector animation program that was incredibly advanced called Living Cells. While Living Cells was in beta, MS bought Creature House and all its assets. As a result, the Expression vector application no longer exists. MS was offering it for free for a while.
Apparently MS wanted some of the code from Living Cells and Expression. The result is the Expression suite of tools for web development and Silverlight (which I think has a root in the code of Living Cells).
Most likely Caligari had hit on some interesting code. MS was most likely not too interested in trueSpace itself, even though they did try to use it like Google does Sketchup. MS wanted the code to use/modify for their own purposes. Now that they have it, if the rest of the assets (the actual app and even the team of programmers) aren't able to generate income, then they are ditched.
Now, in the case of the programmers from Creature House, MS kept this small team. As far as I know, they are still working for MS. That means that the Creature House team was (and remains) an asset to MS. That says something about them as programmers. What happened with Roman? Is he with MS still? Or not? And if not, what does that say?
