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Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

nirvdrum.com

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Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#161

Post by rwallace »

hueving wrote: post #109
toomuchtodo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone won't pay for a closed product, and won't pay to open it up, they don't value it at all.

This completely ignores customers without boatloads of cash laying around. I've worked in educational institutions where there is absolutely no budget to do something. However, people that are genuinely interested in accomplishing something will turn to open source. They have time to contribute back through documentation, bug reports, and even bug fixes. The only thing they don't have is money. That doesn't mean they…

If you're interested in seeing something open sourced and you have time but not money, consider offering to do some of the requisite cleanup work under NDA.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#162

Post by jarofgreen »

mindcrime wrote: post #9

Luckily this is one decision I'll never have to make if we ever fail and shutdown. All of our code is Open Source, ASLv2 licensed, and has been from day 0. Well, OK, maybe not a few internal tools and things, but all of our product code is OSS already, on GitHub and ready to go. We consider this a strong selling point to our current prospects, actually. There's no fear of vendor lock-in, they can kick us out tomorrow…

Well, that's great and all but be careful not to be to flippant about it.

It's a very different business model, with different advantages and disadvantages that are very hard to compare directly. It's not an easy decision to make.

My current project was Closed Source for a year and a half and has now been Open Source for a year.

Open Source was always something I thought about, and sometimes people asked, but the thing that made me flip over was the realisation one morning after some bad sales meetings that with either a Open Source or Closed Source project, making a project that users both actually want and you can get some money for was very hard work, and if I was going to do all that work anyway I may as well do the one I personally preferred.

So I Open Sourced it, and I feel I did so from a position of strength. It's been a great year for the project, and I don't regret it.

I've also been on the flip side of that; Open Sourcing a project from a position of weakness. We had talked about Open Sourcing it from the start but never did, then the project never took off and in the final stages before we finally killed it we Open Sourced it. It never gave us or anyone else that I know off any benefit, and was a waste of time.

Thanks nirvdrum for a honest and good post - I'm actually talking about Open Sourcing my project in a week and would like to quote your blog - with a link and credit, of course. Good luck for the future ...

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#163

Post by buro9 »

shurcooL wrote: post #160
buro9 wrote: post #11

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-serv…

Wow, I didn't know that... Your bluemonday package is one of higher quality and useful Go libraries I know.

That was one of the bits we had always intended to open-source. There was a real need for decent HTML sanitisation in Go.

When I find the time and energy (between the new job and getting married in a month), I still want to add CSS sanitisation to the mix as well.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#164

Post by buro9 »

gfwilliams wrote: post #41
buro9 wrote: post #11

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-serv…

As one of buro9's users, I have to say I was very happy to hear that the software was going to be Open Sourced, however I was dreading having to migrate it all to my server. In the end I'm much happier that buro9 found a way to keep it ticking over. Given the choice of continued service vs. Open Source I definitely would have chosen continued service - but it's even better to have both!

> the end I'm much happier that buro9 found a way to keep it ticking over

It's worth noting for people that don't know, that I ate my own dogfood. The communities and forums I run are now hosted on Microcosm.

So when we were facing the "What next?" moment, I knew I had to install and setup my own instance of the platform just to give my users an uninterrupted service.

What I did, was for every customer already on the platform who had stuck with us, loved what we'd done... I offered them space on my instance.

I never wanted to leave even a single customer in the lurch. I think it sucks that startups do, especially if a way can be found.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#165

Post by zb »

If you use the term "Open Source" as a verb, you're probably Doing It Wrong.

If you develop a piece of software in the open, preferably with a community around it, then you won't be able to get away with it being impossible to deploy or containing inappropriately-licensed subcomponents. If you don't, you'll likely run into all of the problems the author mentions, and more, when you go to 'Open Source' it. Not only that, but there'll be nobody to maintain the resulting project, and it's likely that nobody will actually benefit.

Open Source is great (FWIW I work exclusively on Open Source at the moment), but it isn't like a condiment you can spread on after the fact. It needs to be baked in to your strategy.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#166

Post by nirvdrum »

jarofgreen wrote: post #162
mindcrime wrote: post #9

Luckily this is one decision I'll never have to make if we ever fail and shutdown. All of our code is Open Source, ASLv2 licensed, and has been from day 0. Well, OK, maybe not a few internal tools and things, but all of our product code is OSS already, on GitHub and ready to go. We consider this a strong selling point to our current prospects, actually. There's no fear of vendor lock-in, they can kick us out tomorrow…

Well, that's great and all but be careful not to be to flippant about it. It's a very different business model, with different advantages and disadvantages that are very hard to compare directly. It's not an easy decision to make. My current project was Closed Source for a year and a half and has now been Open Source for a year. Open Source was always something I thought about, and sometimes people asked, but the thi…

By all means, quote away. Writing this was cathartic for me. If it helps others, even better.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#167

Post by solistice »

iandanforth wrote: post #121
jpollock wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had to do the same thing, and had a completely different experience. I sold our stuff on an auction site (TradeMe, the NZ EBay equivalent), with $1 reserve, and applied some of the lessons I've learned from lurking here. My wife thought I was crazy. She was completely ready with the "I told you so". I argued that we didn't have time to relist it if it didn't sell at the reserve, so $1 it had to be! Everything…

I'm really interested in this, any chance you have the hard numbers on what you spent vs what you made? Marketing is a skill that I'm not great at so this kind of explicit example is very helpful.

Honestly, if you want advice on selling items such as furniture or personal items online, you might want to ask in one of the flipping comunities like /r/flipping on reddit. They don't usually try to get rid of their own stuff, but they sell stock from yard sales, thrift stores craiglist offers, retail arbitage, ect. In fact, you might have drawn some flippers with your free offer. They're usually quite helpful if you ask concrete questions , especially regarding presenting your wares, and there'll proably be members who can tell you what percentage of their revenue goes to shipping and other fees.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/wiki/index]

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#168

Post by heliodor »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #137
heliodor wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a direct result of people being salaried, meaning they're on a fixed budget. As a corporation, you put in something, and something comes out the other end. As a salaried individual, you put in something (more hours) and absolutely nothing comes out the other end.

You're in the wrong job then. Product comes out; your performance review can improve, leading to raises and bonuses.

Yes, raises and bonuses are there for some/most jobs, but people don't make their daily shopping decisions based on their 5-year career plans.

I can imagine hourly workers/consultants thinking to themselves, "Hey, this is a nice piece of software, let me pay the $x it costs for it and I'll stay at work another hour tonight."

I can't imagine salaried employees thinking, "Hey, let me buy A, B, C, D, E, and more, be in a budget deficit for the remainder of the year and hope for a raise!"

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#169

Post by iandanforth »

solistice wrote: post #167
iandanforth wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really interested in this, any chance you have the hard numbers on what you spent vs what you made? Marketing is a skill that I'm not great at so this kind of explicit example is very helpful.

Honestly, if you want advice on selling items such as furniture or personal items online, you might want to ask in one of the flipping comunities like /r/flipping on reddit. They don't usually try to get rid of their own stuff, but they sell stock from yard sales, thrift stores craiglist offers, retail arbitage, ect. In fact, you might have drawn some flippers with your free offer. They're usually quite helpful if yo…

Thanks! I'd never heard of /r/Flipping and the direct link to the wiki was very useful.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#170

Post by rudolf0 »

nirvdrum wrote: post #138
rudolf0 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a sense of entitlement, but it's far more reasonable. If you spent years working on a codebase which at least a few people liked enough to use, is it really worth dumping all that code in the trash for all of eternity just because you'd incidentally end up capitulating to some obnoxious people when you open source it?

Setting aside the licensing issues, and assuming it's just because I don't feel like dealing with obnoxious people, something still doesn't make sense to me. Prior to announcing the shutdown, no one had access to the source. I've made a lot of it available since then, but not all of it. Today, they still don't have access to that source. How is society any worse off? Unless your belief is simply that all code should…

No, I don't think all code should be open source at all.

Humanity isn't worse off for it if you don't release the source, but you could potentially make humanity better off by releasing it. If you keep it to yourself forever, never to be used or seen again, you reduce the chance of helping someone's project or improving someone's life to 0%.

If you do release it, there's that chance that a few people out there will borrow some of its ideas to help them out, or perhaps they'll actually use the entire codebase so they don't reinvent the wheel. This could save them a lot of time and effort. Or maybe a non-coder will use it because they genuinely want to use the app. And who knows, maybe it'll be a lot more than a few people.

It's just a bit existentially sad to essentially lock all that code produced out of so many man hours in a little sphere that is never opened again.

For a good example of this, look at Isaac Newton's unreleased works.

If you really don't want to appease obnoxious beggars from companies, you can just release it with a license that restricts all, or certain kinds, of commercial use.

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