Eventually Nostalrius forked it, slapped marketing and a website on it, became huge and those guys got to visit Blizzard Entertainment, in the end leading to Blizzard finally giving in an providing World of Warcaft Classic as a service.
Cost me tons of money to keep the project running because we were constantly under attacks from god knows who and in the end burned me out after a decade of doing this.
To this day private servers are using it, and probably six figures of people play on those.
