31–40 of 48 posts
If you're shutting down due to insolvency, this may not be an option.
People talk about this as if it's an action you can take. The title even uses it as a verb: "open source" it. Is "open sourcing" even the decision of the developer, in reality? Sure, the developer can decide to release the code as open source. That's fine. But to make an open source project requires a lot more commitment than that[1]. An open source project is kinda like a startup. You need your product (the code) yo…
I have seen quite a few code bases, where the original author who didn't want to continue the project, just released the source code somewhere (as zlib, public domain, GPL or what ever) but nothing more. If there was interest by some other developers, there was always some new open source project/community building itself up around the released code. And if not immediately, maybe a few years later. E.g., some example…
oh wow, I worked on puzzle pits for a while trying to get it to compile.
I ended up figuring out that the original binary ran perfectly fine in dosbox (which I played for a bit) and that the original code was pretty much useless and it would be easier to do a complete rewrite of the game to get it to work with a modern system. Not to mention this doesn't even use a recent standard version of C. So I ended up losing all motivation because of this and because of being a 1 man team.
It was a fun project though, it was this project that introduced me to the hacks that made dos games possible :)
I realize it might not actually be that simple post-acquisition or some such, but at least at present it gives me the option of a consolation prize. I could take all the cool bits with me to use on the next project.
Companies may have elaborate infrastructures and sets of dependencies, and it may take a lot of time to come up with something that even builds correctly in isolation.
Open-source basically has to be planned early on: use freely-available tools, use common platforms, etc. and then open-sourcing it later may not be too difficult.
I actually wrote this into a founders agreement. If we decide to give up on the product, the company shall release the source under a BSD license. I realize it might not actually be that simple post-acquisition or some such, but at least at present it gives me the option of a consolation prize. I could take all the cool bits with me to use on the next project.
People talk about this as if it's an action you can take. The title even uses it as a verb: "open source" it. Is "open sourcing" even the decision of the developer, in reality? Sure, the developer can decide to release the code as open source. That's fine. But to make an open source project requires a lot more commitment than that[1]. An open source project is kinda like a startup. You need your product (the code) yo…
Being open-sourced doesn't prevent any codebase turning into some kind of abandonware. Certainly for me I have used a lot of software that turned out to be abandoned no matter they are open-sourced or not. But here is the problem, if it's a service, it's worse than abandoned. You simply can't use it. If it is just some desktop software, I can stick with an ancient version until I fill sick maintaining the running environment. For a service, that is it.
So to my own end, open-sourcing it, is at least, better than simply vaporize the service (which many of Google's services have been like that for the past months.)
People talk about this as if it's an action you can take. The title even uses it as a verb: "open source" it. Is "open sourcing" even the decision of the developer, in reality? Sure, the developer can decide to release the code as open source. That's fine. But to make an open source project requires a lot more commitment than that[1]. An open source project is kinda like a startup. You need your product (the code) yo…
What you say is true for software that needs to be improved . But I use and love some semi-abandonware and couldn't care less about improvements: TextMate 1, NewsFire, Lineform, AAA game ports to OS X, lots of iOS software that is ever being updated once. iOS currently makes for a good example , because all it takes for some old apps to use the Retina display is to recompile the very same source with newer dev tools…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, I've not actually heard of Copycopter before, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to make the causative link between your announcement of shutting down, to also having AOL and Oink following suit. Correlation does not prove causation. (I've not actually heard of copycopter before). I think they were trying to joke about the shutdown. I don't think thoughtbot would have been under any illusion that the events we…
Hahaha. Yes, I was joking. Sorry about that, apparently not funny! :)
So, these guys openly admit they indirectly caused AIM to shut down and everybody is just congratulating them about going open source?! They should be drawn and quartered for that!! (no seriously guys, nice job on the open sourcing :) )
Actually, they should also be congratulated for causing AIM to shut down.
People talk about this as if it's an action you can take. The title even uses it as a verb: "open source" it. Is "open sourcing" even the decision of the developer, in reality? Sure, the developer can decide to release the code as open source. That's fine. But to make an open source project requires a lot more commitment than that[1]. An open source project is kinda like a startup. You need your product (the code) yo…
For other ideas, maybe a new team will actually pick up the idea and continue to work on it as a company. I am currently working a startup project and we found a company, that was working on the same idea for 3 years and ultimately gave up. We emailed them and are hoping that they can share some lessons, but imagine we they open sourced their code. That might have really given us a jump start. But then again, as a developer I prefer writing by own code from scratch, to working on someone else's (by definition) crappy (most likely) PHP code base.