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Should I open-source my old project?
I worked as the sole developer at a small real-estate company a few years ago, 2005-2007. One of the large projects I built at the time was an ajax-driven real-estate oriented CMS that was oriented around us being able to list our available rental vacancies.
The company died about 1.5 years ago, and I still have my backup copies. Copyright ownership isn't an issue, so I'm free to release it if I want.
I've been wondering if I should open-source the codebase and put it out for whoever wants it. One thing I'm worried about is that in the 2+ years since I was working there, I've learned a hell a lot more about PHP, proper database construction, and frontend coding. I'm still very proud of the work I did, but it is a bit dated. There were a few features that were nearly ready for release before I left the company. They're still in the code but were never turned on.
So should I just put it out there? Or should I go through and update the codebase before releasing it? Is there even any interest in an open-source rental property CMS?
- qhoxie 18y agoThere is a good market for rental applications. I think open sourcing it would be a good idea, along with cleaning up the code.
- nostrademons 18y agoWhat I've been doing with my failed startup is to cut off the pieces that are generally applicable to programmers, then clean them up, document them, and release them as separate open-source projects. Most projects that are built as for-profit websites aren't viable without the support of an ongoing organization. If they were, some college kid would've cloned them, open-sourced them, and driven you out of business. So chances are, you won't find too much interest in an open-source rental property CMS. Techies will probably like it, but ordinary people want a business they can turn to when things go wrong. That doesn't mean that there's nothing in the codebase that might be useful to people. Most good software is built in layers - the bottom layers are often generally useful while the top layers are good only for specific purposes. Think of the LiveJournal stack: the open-sourced LJ code seems to be useful only for competing with LiveJournal, but memcached and MogileFS have widespread usage across a variety of projects.
- bdotdub 18y agoIt doesn't hurt anyone if you do release right? Since you've learned a lot more of PHP, I imagine it would be somewhat interesting working through a bit of your code, while fixing it up too. I think there's always interest in other peoples' work. you never know who will find your work useful. As long as one person does, I think it's worth it. Maybe someone can learn a bunch from your code, even if they aren't interested in a rental property CMS. So, in short, yes :)
- geuis 18y agoThanks for the replies folks. Very helpful!