Lessons learned from buying an open source repo

Summary

Our tiny startup recently acquired the most popular open-source Unity MCP repo on GitHub, and things didn’t quite go as planned. Here are the lessons we learned for anyone considering buying an open source repo.Why we bought the repoFirst, we like open source and want Unity MCP to stay relevant and open source indefinitely.Second, there’s distribution: being the name behind the project. If you don’t want to set up MCP yourself, you can one-click install Coplay for a premium experience.When the original creator of Unity MCP, Justin Barnett, agreed to sell - and to join our team - we were delighted.For all of us on the team, this was our first repo acquisition. We did a bunch of research on mechanics and ROI - and still learned a few things the hard way:1. SEO of the repo gets resetIn summary the Google SEO gets trashed when you change the owner of a repo. After the purchase, ownership moved to our Coplay organization on GitHub. The repo URL changed fromhttps://github.com/justinpbarnett/unity-mcptohttps://github.com/CoplayDev/unity-mcpThe old URL redirects to the new one, so in theory existing posts/backlinks keep working.We also agreed the original creator wouldn’t reuse the “unity-mcp” repo name under his GitHub profile, which could break redirects.Stars, watchers, and forks were preserved.For the first few days, things looked fine. Pre-acquisition, searching “Unity MCP” put the repo at the top (it had ~3k stars). Two days after the move, “unity mcp github” showed it at #4 - odd, but we shrugged. The next day, one of my co-founders couldn’t find it at all. Same on our side: the GitHub repo with ~3k stars had vanished from Google.2. Media outlets don’t care about OSS repo acquisitions (and probably nobody else does either)Because it felt big to our tiny team, we prepped a press release and pitched it under embargo to several outlets (TechCrunch, SiliconAngle, TechForge, VentureBeat, etc.).None seemed interested.PocketGamer eventually agreed to cover it, then went qui...