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A Sad Announcement

omniref.com

21–30 of 78 posts

Re: A Sad Announcement

#22
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

> They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually Not necessarily - just mention that the project is abandonware/looking for a new maintainer. Having access to the code will be helpful to anyone looking to move forward or build on it without tying you down, and anyone who finds a workable model can benefit from your fork.

Just want to throw in some support for what nebabyte said here. The community can be super kind towards this kind of thing. Also, I'm guessing you already have documentation on usage a plenty that you created via the original site so it wouldn't be unusable.

I know this also might be too soon to think about so do take your time to come to a better place mentally before considering it :). Good luck with whatever the future holds! I sincerely hope things get better for you

Re: A Sad Announcement

#23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

I totally agree that maintaining it as open source will take a lot of time and effort.

What platform is Omniref written in? I'm interested in exploring adding it as a feature of our GitLab. But there has to be enough interest and the tooling should match (we use Ruby, Go, and elastic search).

We can pay for the effort required. And the lessons you learned will live on. Although I would totally understand if your priorities are different.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#24
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

>Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well.

This might sound mean, but I don't intend it that way: you've already "failed" as a business, so there's no reason to hold yourself to a high standard in the open-source department.

You can totally just drop a code blob on Github and let folks fork it and start organizing to maintain it themselves--it's not like you have anything to lose, and somebody might even find it useful some day.

It's weird to me that people have that hangup about releasing code...if people don't like it, they just won't use it.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#25
post #21

Please don't be snarky toward a fellow user. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13281887 and marked it off-topic. Edit: the comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13282118 . My mistake; undetached.

I meant no offense. I love Star Trek and somehow that felt like a great analogy.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#26
post #13
post #4

This is sad, and a bit perplexing. According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity ) and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last couple of years and add their biological distin…

Hi. Founder here. I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite, actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style, "why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this sort of stuff. The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they usually come…

Hey, I don't know what kind of mental state you are in but I imagine your feeling pretty bummed so just wanted to say that I loved OmniRef and you made an incredible product. And though it's shutting down, you are successful. You did what very few people have the courage or ability to do: you started a company. So I can't wait to see what you do next. And I hope you can look back at OmniRef with good memories and keep your head up.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#28
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

I don't understand why. Strip credentials from your source, dump it on GitHub. It may or may not get picked up by someone else, but this in itself is already better than having the project die. It also doesn't make you committed to anything.

So honest question - even if you don't feel like maintaining it later, why not open source anyway?

Re: A Sad Announcement

#29
post #25
post #21

Please don't be snarky toward a fellow user. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13281887 and marked it off-topic. Edit: the comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13282118 . My mistake; undetached.

I meant no offense. I love Star Trek and somehow that felt like a great analogy.

Ok! Sorry for misreading you. I've put the comment back where it was.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#30
post #29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant no offense. I love Star Trek and somehow that felt like a great analogy.

Ok! Sorry for misreading you. I've put the comment back where it was.

Thank you. I felt pretty bad about coming off as being snarky.
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