A Sad Announcement

+ Licenses

+ Documentation

+ Structure and organisation

+ Time and effort

I shut my startup and open-sourced our code. But it was hard, very hard.

It takes a significant effort at a time when you've just expended all the effort you have in trying to get funding or a future.

First you need to go through your entire code and ask: What code or assets were acquired under a license that prohibits open-sourcing or re-licensing? This may be a library, or it may be a paid-for webfont, or it may be licensed photos or UI packages. For every one identified, you now need to find an alternative that can be used and implement it before you can open source and remove reference to the old before you open source.

Then there is the documentation, whilst you have a small team of a couple of people who intimately know the code you probably focused more on shipping than documenting. To open source really asks for the documentation more than the shipping... the ability to survive as an open source project isn't just about providing value it is to deliver that value in a way that people can access which means documentation.

Then there is the structure and organisation of the code. The finest example of this is that you probably aimed at the sky and have built a multi-tenant SaaS platform in which most components can scale independently of the others. This stuff is complex to deploy and run, but that's OK as you're probably running only 1 to 3 instances in total. But someone who is a user of your software cares not about this, and just wants it to work for a single tenant with a super-simple deploy process to get started. It is really hard to take a "built for SaaS in a single environment (AWS)" and make it a "built for someone to deploy wherever" thing.

All of the above add up to months worth of time and effort. Time when you're looking at your bank balance and realising that you need a job to avoid being homeless. Time that you simply don't have, and effort that is best focused on finding a job.

When your startup dies, there is certainly a lot that could be open-sourced, but unless you spent the last few months of the startup life working towards that... it is the lowest priority thing you can do.

What you should do when your startup fails:

#1 Focus on you, your health and state of mind. See friends, eat well, exercise, get out of the city if you can.

#2 Get a job. You're super valuable right now and you're in demand. You can build product, manage a team, probably code, and you really should get money in so that you have security and stability you probably haven't had for a while.

Take time, recover.

Worry about open-sourcing, or starting the next new thing, in the future. When your startup fails, now is for you to recover.

Edit: And open-sourcing makes a huge assumption that your investors (who own the rights to a chunk of this stuff) even agree that you can just give away what they invested in.

> Edit: And open-sourcing makes a huge assumption that your investors (who own the rights to a chunk of this stuff) even agree that you can just give away what they invested in.

Interesting point. Is it really accurate? I mean, if investors to a company literally have partial ownership of the company's IP, does it also mean that the company cannot decide to open-source part of its code (i.e., license away part of the company's IP rights), or license code to a third party, without the approval of its investors?

(Not a rhetorical question, but a legitimate question.)

Shareholders own the assets at the time the company is wound-up, those assets include the code and IP.

It may be that as a founder and at an early stage, that you own the majority of those assets but you are still exposing yourself to a bit of a legal nightmare if you assume that majority ownership gives you the right to dispose of it as you see fit. If any investor could argue that you can sell the IP for any price that would offer them a return, it's going to be risky.

In my case, my seed investors were users of the software we created. They wanted the software to be available and so it was all fairly easy, but I was well aware that there was a huge risk there. I probably would not have opened anything if they had said no.

Stupid question: what does Omniref do that can't be done with source code comments? Comments are readable by anyone in any editor and do not require external tools. They are co-located to the relevant lines of code by being part of the source, and are as portable as the code itself. My first impression is that it is a solution seeking a problem.

What format will the data be in? Will it be given in a format usable as the way your service provided? That either speaks to the fact that the service wasn't needed (which doesn't sound right) or that the users will need to do a lot of sword sharpening to fix the gap in their tooling now that you are gone.

In effect, people are going to miss you.

Also, for the kind of work that some people do it's impossible to use any outbound network stuff that looks at the source code. That's off the table. That's also a huge client base.