Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

nirvdrum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 171 posts

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#11

Post by buro9 »

I really feel for nirvdrum here, we had exactly the same hard process with Microcosm.

We were somewhat better placed to open it up, we had separated various parts more completely, hadn't put in the full billing engine, and had no third party code or other things that we were distributing that might be an issue.

But... one of the things nirvdrum didn't touch upon was that we just hadn't designed it to be a single-server, single-customer install.

We designed it as a platform, and made assumptions along the way. I didn't mind opening the embarrassing code (everyone's shit smells), but the people who were asking all seemed to want a single, well-documented install... and we were having to walk away and go get a day job.

We did choose to open it in the end, and you'll find our work here: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/

But I only know of a few people who have actually installed it to date (and struggled, because it's not well documented). All of the effort to open-source it just found another set of tyre kickers.

Sigh. It's tough. Just letting go. And it's definitely made tougher by wrangling with these questions and trying to do the right thing without investing so much at a time when you're exhausted, broke and likely quite down about things.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#12

Post by xpto123 »

hw wrote: post #2

most of the time it's extremely hard to just go open source when a startup dies. There's issues of ownership and also the amount of work needed to get a typical startup codebase clean, refactored and open source ready is difficult. It's kinda like having a garage sale and giving everything away - it's hard to give away or sell every single thing, but parts of it might be useful to the community.

AFIK, AngularJS was the result of improving and open-sourcing the code of a failed startup, after taking it to Google, adding a tone of features to the codebase and using it in internal projects before open sourcing it.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#13

Post by toddgardner »

Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust. They loved your product, and proved that the market existed--but it wasn't as big as you thought.

When closing down, has anyone explored not completely shuttering the company, but instead continuing to exist as a licensing entity? License the source code itself to your existing customers so that they can continue using it, without all the messiness involved in open sourcing it completely?

Probably a terrible idea, but it's what this blog left me thinking.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#14

Post by nirvdrum »

buckbova wrote: post #3

So what now? Did you get a day job? Honestly, there shouldn't be any rush to do anything. You released some good tools, and that's fine.

I came to the realization that Mogotest didn't have a future, at least with me, over the summer. I've evaluated a lot of opportunities in that time. The hardest part being that I didn't really have a clue what I wanted to do. My strategy was to cast a wide net and see if anything excited me.

It took a while, but I'm happy to say I joined as a researcher at Oracle Labs working on their JRuby/Truffle implementation. I started this week and while it's early days yet, I feel relieved in a way I haven't in years.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#15

Post by barce »

There's a cost to open sourcing software. I like that the OP pointed that there was software that was sub-licensed and needed to be excised. Netscape took close to a year to open source their browser as Firefox using every significant company resource.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#16

Post by nirvdrum »

johncoltrane wrote: post #4

Open source… the dumpster of the startup world.

Well, the parts I could integrate with upstream projects, such as Selenium, I already had. Much of the remaining stuff is useful in its domain and small enough in scope where on-going development really shouldn't be necessary. And the parts I thought would essentially be "dumped", I opted not to open source for precisely that reason.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#17

Post by tptacek »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #10
maaaats wrote: post #7

What I hate is that some people feel entitled to getting one's hard work for free.

No, that's not the issue. People object to useful IP rotting in the back of a filing cabinet, unused. It's not about getting it free, it's about being able to get it at all. (Some people may want things for free but that's a different issue.)

That objection is a form of entitlement.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#18

Post by toolshift »

Having been through this kind of decision before, this really resonates with me. Especially the pettiness.

When your business fails after years of struggle because people didn't want to pay for your software, and those same people make you feel guilty for not supporting the codebase after you can't pay the bills... that breeds the kind of resentment that creates real-life Walter Whites. It's hard to understand the experience unless you've been through it.

One thing that came out of it is that now I always try to find a way to pay for the things I use. Especially when I don't have to -- because I know I'm in the minority. And when I don't pay for something and that something goes away, I don't get frustrated anymore. I know i'm getting what I pay for.

In short, please pay for your software.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#19

Post by jarcane »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #10
maaaats wrote: post #7

What I hate is that some people feel entitled to getting one's hard work for free.

No, that's not the issue. People object to useful IP rotting in the back of a filing cabinet, unused. It's not about getting it free, it's about being able to get it at all. (Some people may want things for free but that's a different issue.)

I agree there's something to that.

But I've also seen first hand that actually, yes, a whole fuck of a lot of people just want something for nothing and will happily tell you how great your thing is but only when they don't have to pay anything for it. And even once you do go free and open "to save it from the filing cabinet," any option you leave open to contributing to the maintenance of it long term even will be largely ignored.

Even Mozilla continues to exist more because of the search engine licensing money than actual contributions to the effort.

Post reply on HN