My thought is that Gibson already shopped Sonar around before announcing it's closure and no one was interested. 
 
It would be nice if someone picked it up but like many others have said, I think that time has passed

It is an interesting point that Cakewalk actually never announced the shut down to the broader audience of users. No email announcement (unless mine went to spam) and no Facebook announcement (the Kirk Hammett blog post is the last thing they posted there). I'd imagine most traffic shows up here from Google searches for help that lead directly to forum posts or knowledge base pages -- neither of which have any sort of indication that business is not as usual. I'd have to guess that the vast majority of users aren't the types that are actively going out to forums, keeping up on music software news, etc..
 
What percentage of SONAR users can we reasonably estimate know the news at this point? 10%? I seem to recall people brought this up at the time and Cakewalk's response was that they haven't done a broader announcement because they needed to close out the monthly subscriptions first so why still no broader announcement over a month later?
 
Maybe it's a positive sign meaning they are holding off due to active talks of a sale behind the scene. Maybe it's a negative sign meaning no one is around to send out such an announcement. If that is the case, who is going to be around to keep the servers running or release the mythical magic activation mechanism?

It's a mass psychological experiment.  They are watching to see how many conspiracy theories spring up; how many people jump ship and how many stick around to wait and see.  They're watching us, recording our every thought. I myself might even be the CEO of Gibson, but I would never say that for obvious reasons.

Anderton

backwoods
Don't know why they didn't charge for the adaptive limiter, drum replacer, and linear phase replacements.

I was mystified by that as well. The original plan built around lifetime updates involved charging for add-ons. That was dropped, as was selling plug-ins to users outside of the "Cakewalk ecosystem."

Don't see how e can blame Gibson for this.

anydmusic

Anderton

backwoods
Don't know why they didn't charge for the adaptive limiter, drum replacer, and linear phase replacements.

I was mystified by that as well. The original plan built around lifetime updates involved charging for add-ons. That was dropped, as was selling plug-ins to users outside of the "Cakewalk ecosystem."

Don't see how we can blame Gibson for this.

FWIW Gibson was in favor of the original plan. FL Studio and Microsoft had already shown that particular approach could be viable, so it wasn't seen as much of a risk.

With a software company like Cakewalk, a very large chunk of the value is in the top software developers on the team.  If a sale isn't immediate, those developers have to move on to feed their families, and once they're gone, you have a big chunk of code without the team that were neck-deep in it.  I would bet it would take years for a new bunch of devs to come up to speed with the code.  That makes the code a perishable item, and if Sonar has not been sold by now, it's on life support at best.  Very soon, if not already, it will be unsaleable.
 
The reality is that it's all over.  Holding onto hope that it will be revived is just going to break your hearts.  Keep using Sonar for as long as you can, or move onto a new DAW.  Sonar is dead - long live the king.

It is over.
But I wont discourage others from keeping hope, like some on this forum appear to be doing. No one needs therapists. Let them feel and think how they want.
If people want to hold out hope, who am I (or anyone else) to tell them otherwise. But its just my opinion that it is all done and if Sonar was making any profit, it wouldn't have been killed off.

I do agree that the lifetime updates was a very generous offer for those who took part in it. Why not gain income from all streams though? Why only one or the other?
 
Anyways... this is all water under the bridge. I do hold out some hope something positive will eventually transpire. I don't think many of the crowd here would be so fast to forget Sonar ever existed. Like many here I own and use multiple daws. 
 
If Sonar pops up under a new name for a reasonable price. I'll buy it probably more out of curiosity initially than anything else, but make no mistake I would buy a copy. The program as it is is still way better than many of the others.
 
I have no issue with dropping my lifetime updates under a new company. 
 
 
 
 

If Ik buys, I think it would be a good fit.

bitflipper
Yeh, can't wait to get SONAR on my iPhone!

iProject5 on a tablet might not be a bad way to spend time on a flight though.