It remains one of the largest hosts of online stores in the world, powering more of the top 500 internet retailers than any other hosted store platform.
As pg once joked, Yahoo Stores still hosts pg's blog. (I presume that by that, Paul is referring to his paulgraham.com site, but I may be mistaken about which site he had in mind.)
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.
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
