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_My_ source code is invaluable. It's open, public, free to reuse under the GPL. It's a complete implementation of a painting application used by millions of people. It's a huge amount of knowledge readily accessible. You won't be able to buy something like this for any sum of money, so it's free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Youtube-dl is an app chasing a moving operating of trying to interact with other sites APIs... many of which don't really even want to let youtube-dl do that. Most apps aren't in such a difficult space and keep working basically forever.
> Most apps aren't in such a difficult space and keep working basically forever. Sadly, this doesn't match my experience. Software that isn't actively maintained always dies, sooner or later.
I'm running the final release of Winamp as I type this. I organize my hard disk with the 1.0 of Spacemonger, which was free before it went paid. I edit audio files with Sound Forge 11 (up to 14 or so now) and before that I had a pirated copy of 6.0 that worked pretty well. I have a 'programs' folder full of stuff that runs without installation, some of which hasn't been touched in 5 or 10 years, and everything still runs when I try it.
Code is eternal.
And the legality bit? Big companies who aren't Uber know this isn't worth it, but even with smaller companies, if someone internally notices, the company could be in a lot of legal trouble. I haven't worked anywhere that would even consider using a competitor's code.
Google, or any other respectable company, would not touch source code without a permissive license with a ten foot pole, least of all if it was retrieved as a result of improper access.
I agreed with a lot of the points and that often source code might not be valuable but.... Much of it sounded like only thinking of a small team doing something no one else care about. Conversely we have github and the millions of libraries it hosts in the form of source code. We also have examples of WebKit based on KHTML, Blink based on that. Electron/Edge/Brave/Vivaldi based on Chromium. There is no one programmer…
Usually in OSS projects you have a handful or so of contributors doing the bulk of the work, right? Imagine them all going away at once for one of those projects you mentioned. I feel the project would be in pretty bad shape.
“One of the fears from management was that a big company like Google could take our code and build a competing service.” Google, or any other respectable company, would not touch source code without a permissive license with a ten foot pole, least of all if it was retrieved as a result of improper access.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Youtube-dl is an app chasing a moving operating of trying to interact with other sites APIs... many of which don't really even want to let youtube-dl do that. Most apps aren't in such a difficult space and keep working basically forever.
> Most apps aren't in such a difficult space and keep working basically forever. Sadly, this doesn't match my experience. Software that isn't actively maintained always dies, sooner or later.
I personally hold the opinion that if the project is not being maintained, giving away the source code allows someone else to pick it up.
"Worthless" is an exaggeration: any significant body of code running a critical business process would be missed---and expensive to recreate---if it were lost. But I think the article does make a good point about the value to others. Unless you have a dev team whose head is in that code, and a business team built around that software workflow, just having the code won't be of much value to you. The value of software…