“Actors who are asking me to add some tracking code are mostly interested in reselling users’ data,” Anashkin said. “Actors who want to purchase it outright will stuff it with malware depending on their level of greed: hijacking affiliate links, tampering with search results, showing popups with shady websites, etc.”
Anashkin’s experience appears to be fairly common. Developers have discussed these solicitations in online forums and several have written blog posts about selling extensions or partnership offers.
Great suspender, ublock (not origin) and some other extensions that i cannot think of have fallen to buyouts
Not just extensions, sometimes it’s entire software companies. Opera Software got bought a few years back.
Damn I’d forgotten all about the great suspender!