I’ve been looking around for other Open Source Games that are full clones (don’t use anything from the original) and found something interesting: This list, for example, mentions Naev yet others like this one and this other one mention Endless Sky (ES) yet not Naev.
Is it because both games are clones of Escape Velocity? They are quite different though.
The plot thickens and a fork of Naev called Nox Iimperi appears.
Looking at their Github pages shows that ES has more people watching it (page for Naev, page for ES).´
The ES developer state (in 2017) that "NAEV has actually been around for quite a long time; it's more than a decade old at this point. Back when I started developing Endless Sky, I considered trying to contribute to NAEV instead, but at that time (late 2013) NAEV had gone over a year without even team blog post, so I wasn't sure it was still alive. (That, and switching back to C if you're a C++ programmer feels like switching back to crayons once you're used to Copic markers.)"
I think that Fam should play ES next. It’s 2024 and both games are on Steam so there was a lot of progress.