4 ms·

Never understood why you wouldn't, at the minimum, open source it if you're shutting the doors

johannes1234321 4y ago
for open sourcing you have to be careful about licenses. As long as you are not "distributing" it is absolutely fine to mix GPLv2, Apache License and proprietary code you got from some vendor all together. But as soon as you distribute this, it becomes messy. And then come all the question on technical integrations, ego ("ugly code!!"), ...
- bin_bash 4y ago
  It'd be pretty hard to litigate against a non-existent company.
lukethomas 4y ago
I am considering it. I have a fiduciary duty to try to fetch a fair value for the assets, but if no one wants the codebase, I'd consider opening it up. Still TBD as I just announced this a couple days ago :)
- jasonnchann 4y ago
  That makes sense. I was mainly wondering for old/past companies that don't end up selling their code base versus for Friday specifically. But maybe thats the answer, most companies end up selling their codebase and it does get reused. Good luck on everything!
pininja 4y ago
I’m a huge advocate of this, and have seen it play out well with the Linux Foundation and Mapzen. In this case, their employees seemed to be very thoughtful about how their projects could live on and be useful beyond the company lifecycle. Aside from the code getting a license and legal audit, finding a trademark sponsor was important to them too so that someone doesn’t come along and re-commercialize their free and open work under the old brand. On the flip side, this process is a lot of extra work to do in a very busy and risky time for a buisness. Efforts to open source may fail and I understand when people in charge choose to spend their time prioritizing their employee’s needs first, technology second. I can understand why the open source priority isn’t practical if the company doesn’t plan for this possibility ahead of time.

for open sourcing you have to be careful about licenses. As long as you are not "distributing" it is absolutely fine to mix GPLv2, Apache License and proprietary code you got from some vendor all together. But as soon as you distribute this, it becomes messy. And then come all the question on technical integrations, ego ("ugly code!!"), ...

bin_bash 4y ago
It'd be pretty hard to litigate against a non-existent company.

lukethomas 4y ago

I am considering it. I have a fiduciary duty to try to fetch a fair value for the assets, but if no one wants the codebase, I'd consider opening it up. Still TBD as I just announced this a couple days ago :)

jasonnchann 4y ago
That makes sense. I was mainly wondering for old/past companies that don't end up selling their code base versus for Friday specifically. But maybe thats the answer, most companies end up selling their codebase and it does get reused. Good luck on everything!

pininja 4y ago

I’m a huge advocate of this, and have seen it play out well with the Linux Foundation and Mapzen. In this case, their employees seemed to be very thoughtful about how their projects could live on and be useful beyond the company lifecycle. Aside from the code getting a license and legal audit, finding a trademark sponsor was important to them too so that someone doesn’t come along and re-commercialize their free and open work under the old brand. On the flip side, this process is a lot of extra work to do in a very busy and risky time for a buisness. Efforts to open source may fail and I understand when people in charge choose to spend their time prioritizing their employee’s needs first, technology second. I can understand why the open source priority isn’t practical if the company doesn’t plan for this possibility ahead of time.