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Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

nirvdrum.com

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Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#151

Post by patio11 »

I love and contribute to OSS, but the community often has a toxic entitlement mentality. It has somehow become for-profit corporations' God-given right to expect free labor from white-collar professionals. Ahem, what?

I have gotten asked about whether I'd OSS my services if I was unable to continue maintaining them commercially. Nope. Not a chance. If they need a soft landing, that soft landing will be a 6 month warning to get your data out, prior to them going into the big bit bucket in the sky. It is extraordinarily difficult to take a multi-tenant SaaS app and turn it into a single-tenant appliance. There are people who do exactly that as a consulting service, and they charge tens of thousands of dollars for it, for a reason. (Plug: take a look at jidoteki.com, which is attempting to productize that particular space.)

Just doing the license review is something that they pay serious professionals with high-three-figures-an-hour bill rates to walk on a file-by-file and function-by-function basis in the case of e.g. an acquisition. If a forgotten subsystem got written by a freelancer 4 years ago and you don't have an IP assignment readily at hand your options are a) locating the freelancer and convincing them to sign additional contracts or b) doing a quick cleanroom reimplementation of code you might not even have know existed.

It's not like OSSing the code will quiet the criticism, either. Some folks simply want to see it OSSed for the same reason they want to see their football team win, but some of the folks have the notion that they're actually going to use it. When it doesn't work (and it won't work), they're going to expect you to fix that for them. For free, naturally. This will often entail doing free tech support for other people's software -- in some cases, other people's very expensive software that they should probably be paying professionals to support for their customers.

If any of this discomfits OSS users, the mint prints out paper ballots which allow you to allocate your votes on desired outcomes for the future. See that some go to the people responsible for software you can't live without.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#152

Post by nirvdrum »

patio11 wrote: post #151

I love and contribute to OSS, but the community often has a toxic entitlement mentality. It has somehow become for-profit corporations' God-given right to expect free labor from white-collar professionals. Ahem, what ? I have gotten asked about whether I'd OSS my services if I was unable to continue maintaining them commercially. Nope. Not a chance. If they need a soft landing, that soft landing will be a 6 month war…

This was a large part of why I decided not to. It took me 6 hours or so to realize that was the path I was heading down. But the end of the 14th hour, I was certain it was a bad call. Releasing something I know was broken and that everyone knew I was the best person to fix just sounded like a recipe for a bad situation.

I wish I had realized it a bit sooner. But, hey, I feel more comfortable having thoroughly exhausted the option.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#153

Post by nirvdrum »

ultramancool wrote: post #147
mkremer90 wrote: post #24

Honestly, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I have people that ask me to open-source my current side-project all the time (one that is paid), and I find it insanely disrespectful. "Yes, let me just hand over the source code for my commercial product. How about not." I'm not trying to sound greedy, but money speaks. If these companies want the software open sourced, they should be pitching in for the cost. If…

Making people pay for something that they already get for free is hard. I have never paid for a piece of software. I have donated to a few open source projects and have contributed code to several too. Most of us developers are used to getting high quality open source software for free and being willing to contribute back to it for that reason. Being asked to pay for it instead just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If…

I know this is going to seem like nitpicking, but most developers will never contribute to open source. Maybe most of the people you are immediately surrounded by do. But a lot of open source is written by a small subset of the population with an extremely long-tail of contributors that will never come close to giving back as much as they take.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#154

Post by primitivesuave »

jsmeaton wrote: post #143
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…

That's really interesting. Perhaps people feel they are getting a better deal if they 'win' (buy) something at $20 that someone else wanted for $19. But if you had of just listed it at $20, then they feel that the seller is just trying to extract as much value as they possibly can. That is - they are getting the market value rather than the arbitrary value the seller assigns. Even if that value ends up being the same…

Here's a relevant tidbit from game theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#155

Post by throwawayaway »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #107
Kequc wrote: post #52

I'm always brought back to the time I decided to literally sell everything I had and leave the country. A few weeks before leaving I listed each item I had for extremely reasonable prices. A $400 couch for $200, table for $20, beautiful custom framed long print of an old possibly rare poster for $50. Laser printer for $20. Ridiculously reasonable prices on everything on and on. Nobody bought anything and every thing…

Pro tip: do some precision anchoring [1] of your offer price. If you had listed your couch as $205, table $21 dollars, etc. you would have probably received offers closer to your asking price. Round number prices signal you have no idea what the items are actually worth prompting people to ask "how about this much." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#Anchoring_in_negotiat...

I dunno about 205/21 dollars but I do know people will think you are copying the price from the store if you put it as 199.99.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#156

Post by [deleted] »

rudolf0 wrote: post #120
tptacek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not rebutting my argument; you're merely saying that the "entitlement" isn't in this case negative. You've confounded a positive argument with a normative one. Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED. I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason…

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?

[deleted]

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#157

Post by throwawayaway »

rudolf0 wrote: post #120
tptacek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not rebutting my argument; you're merely saying that the "entitlement" isn't in this case negative. You've confounded a positive argument with a normative one. Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED. I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason…

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?

It's totally unreasonable for them to try and make some moral argument that they should be allowed to have it if they aren't willing to pay.

Absolutely, yes it is worth hanging on to. "Dumping it in the trash" is such a biased metaphor. Having self respect and not being a pushover pays gains in the long run, so yes it's worth it.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#158

Post by throwawayaway »

pnathan wrote: post #114
nirvdrum wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the purpose of my post was to paint a realistic picture of this process. I suspect much of what I ran into isn't an aberration. Creating a tarball and distributing it is a gross oversimplification of the process in many cases. And there's massive liability exposure in doing so. So, the question then becomes how much more do I owe society? Am I obligated to spend 40 hours to clean up the code? Should I pay for…

Those are really quite fair questions in reality: I'm arguing from principle, but I don't think your complaints are unreasonable. Reality exists, after all. :-) Let me pose a hypothetical example - Suppose your company produced the World's Shiniest Algorithm (WSA), allowing our total software energy use to drop below 10% of what it currently does. And, then, because your company is led by a scientist who can not run…

You seem to think that society deserves to be treated with benevolence, and responds well to it.

As a member of society, I have learned that if something is actually all that great, it will eventually become open source or be replaced by open source. Jeff Atwood had an article about this a long long time ago.

Society learns also from being punished. If people did not give away their work for free, society would learn more quickly that you have to pay people to work. Then society could benefit 1) from paying people to work 2) from having a claim on the work they produce.

They aren't going to learn if people keep bending over.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#159

Post by aragot »

dethstar wrote: post #88
mkremer90 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're completely correct in my opinion, but I'd like to add one crucial point: If people are asking/begging for the tool to be open sourced, then they do indeed value it. Otherwise, why would they care if it just withered and died? They may not have valued it as much as the product was charging for, but that's a different debate entirely. I'm assuming there was some discussion of commercial viability, lowering price…

>If people are asking/begging for the tool to be open sourced, then they do indeed value it. Otherwise, why would they care if it just withered and died? If we are talking about a start up, what about current clients? Maybe your business could not be sustained by the number of clients you had, they do find value in but they can not by themselves sustain your business.

Yes it's totally allowed to sell a product under GPL, for example to give it only to the real customers who paid for it. Those are then free to share, but since they know how much it cost them, they may choose not to.

Re: Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

#160

Post by shurcooL »

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.
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