For a great dev shop to give something to the community, it is an insightful gesture that speaks to their concern for their users. Rather than shuttering and issuing a 'screw you', they made the business decision to stop actively maintaining, clink beers with their customers, and give it away. How do you not respond with "cheers"?
Shutting down a product? Open source it.
41–48 of 48 posts
Re: Shutting down a product? Open source it.
#42I am pretty sure that the main reason a lot of folded start-up companies, killed projects etc. do not just open source their code is 'code pride' in some form.
No one wants to publish a 'hack' to the scrutiny of a elite community of programmers, and for some companies just cleaning up the code to the standards the community expect would cost a lot of money.
Re: Shutting down a product? Open source it.
#43This particularly makes sense for SaaS offerings that are being discontinued. If your product is only available as a service then it is particularly painful when it disappears for those who depend on it. From a business standpoint, open-sourcing is a good way to maintain goodwill and shift the onus of administering the service to those who consume it without leaving them out to dry. All your consumers will have to ma…
If it's truly open source then there's nothing stopping another business from coming in and offering a hosted version much in the same way that the original did. I suspect that the reason this doesn't have so much could be licensing of other libraries etc used by the code.
If it were that easy to run a business in that market, the original probably wouldn't have went under. Companies go out of business for a number of reasons, but I'd bet on the initial founders who had the vision to create the product and have experience in that market over someone who saw free code online and decided to have a go of it. The reason we almost never see it happen (at least successfully) is that there's almost no barrier to entry (anyone else could pick up the same code) and that it's not an easy market (the original company went out of business).
Re: Shutting down a product? Open source it.
#44People 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…
The Quake devs just took the program, dumped the sources online, voila. Open source community built itself.
It really depends on what you're making. If the software is popular, there's little need to help form the community, facilitate the process, and so on. It might help, but just dumping the sources online is way better than nothing.
Re: Shutting down a product? Open source it.
#45My conspiracy theory is that the majority of SaaS startups that get bought don't open source it for shame of how horrible their code is. After all, the only goal of their financers was a quick exit. You don't need pretty code for quick exits. This kind of pressure seeps through to the coders fast enough.
Re: Shutting down a product? Open source it.
#46Rather, sell it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3716808
Re: Shutting down a product? Open source it.
#47That's only an option if you're shuttering the product of your own will. If you're part of a talent acquisition (which is the case with Posterous and Milk), the purchasing company would have to make that call, so you should really address the blog post to them. It's unlikely any of them would: they just paid a bunch of money and acquired the team plus source, and even if they don't use the acquired source, open-sourc…
In a talent acquisition, disposition of source code assets would be up for negotiation among principals prior to closing the deal.
No reason founders couldn't specify this as a condition. Or make it an explicit term of their service agreement to customers/users well in advance of this eventuality. Something like:
"In the event COMPANY concludes business operations or discontinues SERVICE for any reason, including but not limited to sale or acquisition of COMPANY or relevant assets, COMPANY will license SOFTWARE under the terms of $FREE_SOFTWARE _LICENSE, in the preferred form of SOFTWARE for making modifications to it, inclusive of any build, deployment, operations, management, and documentation support."
Where the free software license would be specified, though generally I'd expect this would include a license meeting the FSF's Free Software Definition or the OSI's Open Source Definition and certification.
Re: Shutting down a product? Open source it.
#48People 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 think the attitude here is simply, “if people want it and can get value from it, here it is”. Which is fine. Not every code dump needs to become a living project with an active community. It's nice that they put it out there to allow for the possibility.