22 ms·

Open Sourcing a Failed Startup

344 points by nirvdrum 12y ago

hw 12y ago
most of the time it's extremely hard to just go open source when a startup dies. There's issues of ownership and also the amount of work needed to get a typical startup codebase clean, refactored and open source ready is difficult. It's kinda like having a garage sale and giving everything away - it's hard to give away or sell every single thing, but parts of it might be useful to the community.
- xpto123 12y ago
  AFIK, AngularJS was the result of improving and open-sourcing the code of a failed startup, after taking it to Google, adding a tone of features to the codebase and using it in internal projects before open sourcing it.
  - curun1r 12y ago
    Got a source for that? That's a very different story from the one that Brad and Misko told at the ng-conf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A1VR0ibIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A1VR0ibIQ)
    - xpto123 12y ago
      In wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS is says "AngularJS was originally developed in 2009 by Miško Hevery and Adam Abrons [10] at Brat Tech LLC[11] as the software behind an online JSON storage service, that would have been priced by the megabyte, for easy-to-make applications for the enterprise. This venture was located at the web domain "GetAngular.com",[11] and had a few subscribers, before the two decided to abandon the business idea and release Angular as an open-source library" I think here they mention it in the adventures in Angular podcast that Misko took it from a previous company which was a startup between him and another developer that did not went through -> http://devchat.tv/adventures-in-angular/001-aia-the-birth-of-angular-1 http://devchat.tv/adventures-in-angular/001-aia-the-birth-of... It might also have been here or one of the the Javascript Jabber Angular episodes (their search functionality seems to be down for the moment)
    - xpto123 12y ago
      but it was just the bare bones idea, that got expanded a lot in Google.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    If this is true, then still: > after taking it to Google, adding a tone of features to the codebase and using it in internal projects before open sourcing it. Are pretty unique circumstances, that don't really show that it's an easy thing to do usefully/succesfully, for projects that aren't taken into Google, have a ton of features added by paid Google engineers, and then are used by internal projects at google to work out further kinks and cow paths.
buckbova 12y ago
So what now? Did you get a day job? Honestly, there shouldn't be any rush to do anything. You released some good tools, and that's fine.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  I came to the realization that Mogotest didn't have a future, at least with me, over the summer. I've evaluated a lot of opportunities in that time. The hardest part being that I didn't really have a clue what I wanted to do. My strategy was to cast a wide net and see if anything excited me. It took a while, but I'm happy to say I joined as a researcher at Oracle Labs working on their JRuby/Truffle implementation. I started this week and while it's early days yet, I feel relieved in a way I haven't in years.
  - rexreed 12y ago
    Bummer to hear that, especially as one of the mentors and funders of your Techstars Boston 2010 pool. I only wish that the folks in your pool communicated often and early to the mentors and funders of your Techstars cohort -- we most likely could have helped earlier. Indeed, I think this is the biggest failure I see of startups, regardless of the quality. The seeming inability to reach out for help, guidance, and provide feedback and communicate with others outside their company... especially (and surprisingly) their investors and mentors. Startups - communicate often and early with others.
    - nirvdrum 12y ago
      I had reached out to a few people over the years. Without a doubt, I could have done better. If you'd like to email me, I'd be happy to discuss that aspect more. kevin@<domain_in_article>.
  - mappu 12y ago
    Currently the only other downstream comment from this post starts with "Bummer to hear that". So I want to say, congratulations on your new job. It sounds incredibly interesting. I hope you enjoy it, meet new people and learn new things.
johncoltrane 12y ago
Open source… the dumpster of the startup world.
- bhouston 12y ago
  The quality of open source from startups vary significantly, but so does open source in general.
  - forkandwait 12y ago
    The quality of software varies significantly in general, we just get to see the open source.
- mahouse 12y ago
  This is a very disrespectful comment.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  Well, the parts I could integrate with upstream projects, such as Selenium, I already had. Much of the remaining stuff is useful in its domain and small enough in scope where on-going development really shouldn't be necessary. And the parts I thought would essentially be "dumped", I opted not to open source for precisely that reason.
- zwetan 12y ago
  wow, take a good hard look at what would be the software world without OSS I don't want to go into a rant or anything but really your comment is wrong at so many level dumpster ? as if open source could only result from some failed attempt
- stevewilhelm 12y ago
  While this comment is poorly expressed, I would guess that the majority of Open Source projects atrophy very quickly. Would be interesting to see how many Github projects have regular monthly updates after 12 months, 24 months, etc.
maaaats 12y ago
What I hate is that some people feel entitled to getting one's hard work for free.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  No, that's not the issue. People object to useful IP rotting in the back of a filing cabinet, unused. It's not about getting it free, it's about being able to get it at all. (Some people may want things for free but that's a different issue.)
  - tptacek 12y ago
    That objection is a form of entitlement.
    - scrollaway 12y ago
      No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes from the reuse of its own previous work.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        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 than that it prevents people from publishing or even talking about publishing for fear of having to deal with entitled strangers arguing with them about what to do with their work. Whatever "good" that sense of entitlement does is, I think, outweighed by the bad. You obviously disagree.
        c22 12y ago
        But if one subscribes to scrollaway's hypothesis one must conclude that someone cannot conjure anything new out of thin air, that your work does not exist in a vacuum and that "entitled strangers" are not disconnected aliens, but vested shareholders in your cultural genesis.
mindcrime 12y ago
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 and get a new vendor to support them, they have 100% freedom to modify the code and tailor it to their needs if we don't provide what they need, and - if we close up shop - they have options for future support, whether it means supporting it themselves, or paying someone else to do it. But access to the code will never be a problem.
- patrickg 12y ago
  Plus 100 for this. I've (after one year of business) open sourced my software and this was one of the better moves in my 5 years business history. This opened a lot of doors for me.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  Awesome. I think I could have made this more likely by going more service-oriented from the outset. It was a Rails prototype app that kept growing. Eventually new stuff was service-oriented, but far too much was locked up in a monolithic Rails app. In any event, that would have allowed me to still outsource some of the view stuff to proprietary software while being able to open up the core of it. C'est la vie.
- jarofgreen 12y ago
  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 ...
buro9 12y ago
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-server, single-customer install. We designed it as a platform, and made assumptions along the way. I didn't mind opening the embarrassing code (everyone's shit smells), but the people who were asking all seemed to want a single, well-documented install... and we were having to walk away and go get a day job. We did choose to open it in the end, and you'll find our work here: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ But I only know of a few people who have actually installed it to date (and struggled, because it's not well documented). All of the effort to open-source it just found another set of tyre kickers. Sigh. It's tough. Just letting go. And it's definitely made tougher by wrangling with these questions and trying to do the right thing without investing so much at a time when you're exhausted, broke and likely quite down about things.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  Thanks. That's another excellent point. I think I had it in my post outline and just forgot to put it in here. The Mogotest application is complex to set up. For each version of IE you want to test, you need a separate Windows installation with that version of IE. To test Safari and iOS requires provisioning Macs (we used leased minis running VMs on ESXi). And the code itself runs on a Linux cluster. Since our cluster provisioning and deployment was encoded in the project rubber [1] configuration, that complication is somewhat mitigated. But the point remains: the application requires multiple machines across platforms to be remotely useful. [1] -- https://rubber.io/ https://rubber.io/
- gfwilliams 12y ago
  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!
toddgardner 12y ago
Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust. They loved your product, and proved that the market existed--but it wasn't as big as you thought. When closing down, has anyone explored not completely shuttering the company, but instead continuing to exist as a licensing entity? License the source code itself to your existing customers so that they can continue using it, without all the messiness involved in open sourcing it completely? Probably a terrible idea, but it's what this blog left me thinking.
- juhanima 12y ago
  Not a terrible idea at all, IMHO. Isn't the core idea of OSS to enable those who use the software to modify it and keep maintaining it? It doesn't mean you have to give it to everyone else as well for free. One reasonable choice would be to give or sell your former paying customers just a raw code dump, with a notification and a disclaimer of all the included license problems and other embarrassement. Giving it for free would of course be an easy way to avoid unnecessary liabilities. Who knows, maybe next they want to buy your services to make fixes and new features? Perhaps they might even be willing to sponsor you in making it a proper open source project. Talk to your customers. They are your most valuable asset. EDIT: continued the natural train of thought
- danielweber 12y ago
  > Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust. Will "maintaining trust" pay his mortgage? Unless he's going to found another company, that's not very useful for him.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  I did think about licensing. There are two big problems with that: 1) The costs of running a single instance of the application far exceed the plans I was selling. It requires a certain amount of amortization to become cost effective for a lot of people. Dealing with Windows and Mac licensing and the hardware required just to get the browsers going, let alone the analysis engine, is too much for most of our customers. 2) Browser vendors pump out releases every 6 weeks. Without some form of ongoing support, the app would become obsoleted in fairly short order. As such, the licensing model only makes sense for those that are comfortable messing around with the source. While the article makes it sound like it's a coupled nightmare, most things are actually laid out very nicely. But, it's still a level of complexity a lot of people aren't going to want to tackle.
barce 12y ago
There's a cost to open sourcing software. I like that the OP pointed that there was software that was sub-licensed and needed to be excised. Netscape took close to a year to open source their browser as Firefox using every significant company resource.
- danielweber 12y ago
  He should have always been (trying to be) aware of all the licenses he was using from the start. You can't just use any code you find on the net and staple it into your project.
  - ahlatimer 12y ago
    There's a difference between knowing "I can use this" and "I can let you use this." Even if he was up to speed on his use of various bits of software, that doesn't mean he was fully aware of whether or not he could sub-license it. In fact, in one of the instances (the theme), he was distinctly aware that he could not sub-license it.
  - DatBear 12y ago
    He obviously was aware of the licenses he was using, as he listed them in the post...
  - nirvdrum 12y ago
    I was well aware of the licenses. I was optimizing for delivering value to my customers, not for the best way to give everything away should I go out of business. The world of licensing gets considerably more complicated once you decide to distribute it. There are plenty of things I'm free to use in a service capacity because I'm not distributing them. The issue of linking or derived works or license compatibility doesn't come into play for many licenses if you're not actually distributing software. And that says nothing of the commercial products I licensed that I knew I wouldn't be able to sublicense. But, the name of the game was expediency. I liked the theme on WrapBootstrap. I paid ~$20 for it and got up and running in a weekend. Recreating that would have been considerably more effort at significantly more cost. I made a trade-off, as businesses need to do. It's technical debt, one I'm not obligated to pay and don't see the long-term value being worth it.
toolshift 12y ago
Having been through this kind of decision before, this really resonates with me. Especially the pettiness. When your business fails after years of struggle because people didn't want to pay for your software, and those same people make you feel guilty for not supporting the codebase after you can't pay the bills... that breeds the kind of resentment that creates real-life Walter Whites. It's hard to understand the experience unless you've been through it. One thing that came out of it is that now I always try to find a way to pay for the things I use. Especially when I don't have to -- because I know I'm in the minority. And when I don't pay for something and that something goes away, I don't get frustrated anymore. I know i'm getting what I pay for. In short, please pay for your software.
- zanny 12y ago
  > In short, please pay for your software. I regularly donate to several free software projects (kde, gimp, vlc, firefox, and occasionally others) because they respect my freedom. I strive to avoid proprietary products. If other developers want my money, I want my software freedoms. Those that provide them get money from me. I do understand this is not the norm behavior, and it is awful that it takes developers disrespecting the users of their software to have them pay for it. Just nobody sees the value in software freedom (and yes, even if you cannot write code you benefit from being able to pay any developer to fix your problems, and you can also pay auditors to inspect the code whereas with a proprietary product you are screwed).
  - akerl_ 12y ago
    Given that developers prefer not to starve and companies prefer to stay in business, if we're going to switch to a world where software is open source and everybody pays/donates even though the source is there, consumers need to make the change first. As long as consumers don't pay/donate for opensource software, producers cannot afford to pull the ripcord and switch things over, even if they want to.
webaholic 12y ago
AccelerEyes recently did the same with their product arrayfire(github.com/arrayfire), though I cannot tell if they are successful or not.
mkremer90 12y ago
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 you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all. EDIT: Perhaps this is a good place to drop the "challenge" I gave myself and invited other developers to join me a few months ago. DEVELOPERS - I challenge you to spend some money TODAY: https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-stingy/ https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-...
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I'm not a developer, I'm a DevOps admin, so perhaps I don't understand as well as I would if I was a developer (blood, sweat, time, all that jazz). I can see it being rude for people asking you to open source an ongoing concern side-project. But if your startup failed, your application didn't have any value in the marketplace (or you weren't able to execute). As you said: "If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all." If the market doesn't value it, and it failed, why would people pay to open source it?
  - mkremer90 12y ago
    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 prices, etc. before they chose to shut down. (You pretty much said this part in your second paragraph, this is the "execution" part.)
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      I believe we're in agreement then!
general_failure 12y ago
Fantastic write up! I have long wondered why failed companies and products just don't throw their code into github. Like google reader which bit me big time.
GnarfGnarf 12y ago
There is a real problem with the perceived value of software. The public sees Google giving everything away, not understanding the underlying business model, and assumes all software has little or no value. Software is not made of physical materials, so why should it be compensated? The public sees Apple apps for 99¢, so shouldn't all software be priced like that? I recently dealt with a customer demanding a free upgrade. She paid $29 nine years ago, and was seething mad at having to pay for an upgrade. How do you deal with that? I'm just looking for an Opens Source banker who will give me an Open Source mortgage.
- bonif 12y ago
  >I recently dealt with a customer demanding a free upgrade. She paid $29 nine years ago, and was seething mad at having to pay for an upgrade. How do you deal with that? After 15 years in the field (as a consultant) NOW I can say, you just drop the client if she does not want to pay. These people don't value other people's work.
- frandroid 12y ago
  Ask the customer when was the last time Microsoft gave a free upgrade for Office.
  - vxNsr 12y ago
    Sadly, about two weeks ago... If you're asking why sadly: if you're not paying... etc
- bjornsing 12y ago
  > I'm just looking for an Opens Source banker who will give me an Open Source mortgage. +1 :)
wonjun 12y ago
This is a great post, thanks for sharing!
- conundrum 12y ago
  How is your comment contributing to discussion?
brador 12y ago
There needs to exist a place to simply dump code with no obligations. One of his minor arguments against open sourcing was having to maintain the code base, and i've heard this from others too. With a dumping ground there would be no such obligation.
- brianwawok 12y ago
  Why? Dump it in github with the right license, and anyone can fork it.
  - nirvdrum 12y ago
    One reason is because you'll invariably be criticized for not merging some pull request.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      Create an account with a throwaway address, put the project up, then walk away. I have a few projects on Github that aren't under my name because I don't want to be pestered about them, ever. And I never have.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - markbao 12y ago
    Unfortunately, it wouldn't be that easy—and I assume parent commenter is talking about a "code dump" that is not within legal limits. Original author wants to do things by the book: Setting all that aside, open sourcing the codebase is not some trivial process. And I'm not talking wanting to clean up stuff I might be embarrassed by. Here's a non-comprehensive list of issues that need to be addressed: - The web site design was a theme bought on WrapBootstrap that I don't have the rights to sublicense. - The rich UI widgets come from the commercial version of ExtJS. That needs to be excised or the whole project needs to be GPLv3.
- 12y ago
gfwilliams 12y ago
I actually had a lot of success with Open Sourcing. After a year of making virtually nothing out of selling Espruino as software (while being bombarded with sometimes abusive comments about the fact it wasn't Open), I decided to put it on KickStarter as Open Source hardware a year ago - and the result was very good. My second KickStarter is about to finish in 24 hours too. It's a shame yours didn't work out - I think I was lucky I had something that could be crowdfunded more easily. Having said that, none of the people that berated me for being Open Source have contributed anything back (others have been very helpful though). I've also had to cope with cheap clones, the possibility of competitors using my own software, and a huge support burden from users of other hardware.
- gfwilliams 12y ago
  Just to add: Overall open source has been great in my case. It's just that it's very easy for someone to make a comment on the internet - it doesn't mean they're particularly bothered about it or are prepared to do anything about it!
fedoreo 12y ago
As a redditor, a gentleman and a scholar, I am somewhat divided on this issue. He lists one of the reasons for not releasing the source as "I swear in code". Profanity would not stop us from using the tech, so please, for the love of all that is holy, release whatever you can. tips fedora
ChuckMcM 12y ago
" I decided to try a crowd-sourced campaign to help with the open sourcing effort. Precisely zero of the companies that have been begging me to open-source the code have contributed in any capacity." Wow, that speaks volumes. Good call on not open sourcing your code.
- pnathan 12y ago
  Quite agreed! I do believe that we have a duty (c.f., discussion in thread elsewhere) to try to do it, but if it's not that valuable ... meh! let it go, have a drink, chill.
- fudged71 12y ago
  This is a great use case for crowdfunding!!
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  I think the same goes for those trying to pressure twitpic's owners to give up all of the company's IP for $15k in bandwidth bills. If it's really an indispensable historical archive, as they claim, surely someone is willing to put up some dough and see that twitpic is fairly compensated for relinquishing control of that archive. This goes double now that Twitter is a public company. The fact of the matter is that twitpic is not considered that valuable, or they'd be able to raise some money for the data dump.
  - hobs 12y ago
    As far as I knew, several serious parties affiliated with archive.org offered, contacted them directly, and made plenty of waves to try and buy this capacity. So twitpic might be different, but I agree with the general point: if you care so much and you are making money with it, pay, otherwise go build it yourself.
Kequc 12y ago
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 I managed to sell was preceded by an arduous process of "oh how about this much". Two days before moving out I listed everything I had left for free, which was basically everything. Immediately the phone was off the hook, people were leaving work to come pick up whatever it was. What I'm saying is nobody pays shit for anything.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I've sometimes experienced the opposite, where no one wants it when it's free, but put a price tag on it and suddenly they have to have it right now. Long ago I volunteered at a food pantry that "sold" food for $1 a bag, because (against what Econ 101 would say) people didn't act as entitled when they were entering a transaction.
  - ianlevesque 12y ago
    It also often improves the chances of people taking the food at all, pride/dignity comes into play at all levels.
  - zippergz 12y ago
    Before I gave up on Craigslist completely, I had multiple experiences where I offered something nice for free, people quickly replied to claim it, and either never showed up to pick it up, or made it a complete pain in the ass (e.g. the people who showed up at my house at 6AM on a Saturday to get a couch, after having agreed to come at 10AM).
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      That happens when you're selling things, as well. I have an ironclad "no holds" policy these days - no, I won't hold it for you, I don't care that you're literally driving down the highway and are five minutes away - I've waited days for "five minutes away down the street" guys before, and I never will again.
arjie 12y ago
I think this approach is both pragmatic and reasonable. You felt that open-sourcing the code has certain amount of value and the act of open-sourcing has a certain cost. If someone wanted that, they should have funded the crowdsourcing campaign. It didn't work out because it seems everyone asking wanted it for free. That's their problem. You did everything right.
zackmorris 12y ago
Went through a similar experience with a simple puzzle game that relied on a UDP p2p networking library I was working on. I lost 2 years battling NAT and the nondeterministic nature of networking before I had to throw in the towel. I lost a similar amount, perhaps $40,000 in the form of credit card debt. Took me forever to get out from under it and it destroyed my credit, so I haven't used a credit card since 2008, other than a $500 one for medical emergencies. This is a rough business and I'm not sure if I would want to open source the library either. For one thing, we have better replacements now like ZeroMQ and Firebase. Also the idea of giving up on all that work (that I someday may be able to still use) leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
unidano 12y ago
Reddito r here. I bought the full version and will gladly share the experience with my fellow intellectuals on reddit. Bit of feedback: * try not to use too many fonts on the landing page * try to capture audience by utilizing Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" tips fedor a
grahamasdfg 12y ago
Check out reddit.com, a place where we intellectuals gather to discuss science and atheism. M'lady
WhitneyLand 12y ago
Work on letting the pettiness go because it will only make your own emotional recovery more difficult. Honestly, it might take years for you to fully recover mentally but cynicism will just prolong it. If it helps you financially to not open the code because someone may yet still pay or because it saves you time then thats a good choice, don't feel bad one bit about it. But forget people who "should have paid" if it has no relevance now other than to torment you. You also may have an adjustment period as you go back to working for another company. It's weird because you feel like you've already grown out of that yet will be expected to fit in as a corporate soldier. I can offer hope you will eventually see an upside in personal growth. You'll realize that you've gained experience and expertise in running a company that's rare and extremely hard to come by any other way. Good luck on your road to recovery, don't give up.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  Thanks for the concern. I've sorta gone through this before. I ran another company (Servprise International) for 4.5 years and went through the adjustment back to a full-time job. The biggest difference is this time I'm older and wanted to think about something I could reasonably see myself doing for 3 - 4 years, at least. I'm actually fairly at ease with things. Making the decision to leave it behind was liberating. Dealing with the BS required to shutdown a company is just annoying. But, the open source question has come up quite a few times. I wanted to give it more than a simple "no" answer and explain why. I feel like it's really a loaded question to ask a start-up that just shutdown, especially when it's not often asked of start-ups still running. I threw the pettiness quip in there to be intellectually honest. Taken out, I don't think it materially changes the decision. But I wanted to address it. I'm human. I certainly have irrational tendencies and I'm rather okay with that. Sure, I'll work on them, but humans aren't perfect automata even if this forum is wont to linking to Wikipedia pages on logical fallacies. Even after challenging that part, I couldn't find a strong enough set of pros to outweigh the cons in spending more time to give it away.
conundrum 12y ago
I see no point in open sourcing a failed startup. That would be equivalent to giving away your car just because your bank decided to take away your home.
zmillman 12y ago
I knew I recognized you from somewhere! For those who don't know, nirvdrum's one of the primary contributors to rubber https://github.com/rubber/rubber https://github.com/rubber/rubber (it's a pretty critical part of our current infrastructure) In my book at least, you've already contributed a huge amount to open source and I wouldn't worry about needing to do more :)
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  Thanks. I do what I can. And thanks for your contributions to the project over the years :-)
thecynic 12y ago
Is it possible that you failed at commercialization, and now you can't bear the thought that open sourcing your creation might lead to zero stars and forks on Github? Is it possible that the "bombardment of questions" you claim was nothing more than a handful, maybe in the half-dozen or so range, of people who wanted to offer you emotional support because that is free for them to do while paying you for a product they did not want is not? We don't all get immediate success. What matters is perseverance and determination - never giving up. Not making excuses for why the world failed you. You'll never get anywhere that way.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  The number of leading and insulting questions here lead me to believe you simply didn't read the post. Go back and take the 15 minutes to actually read it. You'll find most of it answered. And feel free to spend a modicum of effort looking me up to determine to what degree I care about stars on GitHub.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - hyperliner 12y ago
    That took some restraint. You are a nice human being for not responding to that comment like it deserved. I wish I could comment the way I would respond, but I am at work now...Good luck to you.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - nirvdrum 12y ago
      It's an acquired skill :-)
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  To be clear, since you made another snarky comment that you deleted, I did have paying customers and it was cash-flow positive. But, I couldn't hire a team on current revenues. And given I had bootstrapped a slow-and-steady business, I didn't have that awesome hockey-stick most people lie about, making raising substantially harder. It wasn't some 6 month operation that failed so I pivoted and I didn't piss through investor money. By any objective measure, I was quite dedicated to it -- to the point that I suffer from intense hand pain due to the amount of typing I do daily. At the end of the day, I didn't want to waste away on a slow-but-steady company. I wanted to lighten my load so I didn't need another hand surgery. I wanted to spend more time with 1.5 year old child. And I wanted to work with smart people learning new stuff. But, by all means, take a single sentence intentionally devoid of context and continue to extrapolate.
biomimic 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo
stevewilhelm 12y ago
I would offer your clients the chance to purchase a software license and send along a list of DevOps contractors you would recommend. You might make some money, your clients will appreciate the offer, and your DevOps friends make gain a client. Win, win, win.
kasparloog 12y ago
I'm the competitor nirvdrum was mentioning (Browserbite). We had a very nice founder-to-founder talk and we have gone through quite a few of the same failures that he has. I have all the respect for nirvdrum. Most people don't manage to hang on that long. To be honest, I was sorry to see mogotest go, because it shows that there might not be any business in cross browser testing. But there is! In my eyes it was a valid effort on all fronts - trying to build a community and handling lots of browser vendor irregularities. He was one of the first ones. But the market wasn't there, yet. Good luck! The cross browser testing space will miss him!
deepsearch 12y ago
One word: music
deepsearch 12y ago
One word: music
patio11 12y ago
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.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  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.
zb 12y ago
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.

344 points by nirvdrum 12y ago

hw 12y ago

most of the time it's extremely hard to just go open source when a startup dies. There's issues of ownership and also the amount of work needed to get a typical startup codebase clean, refactored and open source ready is difficult. It's kinda like having a garage sale and giving everything away - it's hard to give away or sell every single thing, but parts of it might be useful to the community.

xpto123 12y ago
AFIK, AngularJS was the result of improving and open-sourcing the code of a failed startup, after taking it to Google, adding a tone of features to the codebase and using it in internal projects before open sourcing it.
- curun1r 12y ago
  Got a source for that? That's a very different story from the one that Brad and Misko told at the ng-conf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A1VR0ibIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A1VR0ibIQ)
  - xpto123 12y ago
    In wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS is says "AngularJS was originally developed in 2009 by Miško Hevery and Adam Abrons [10] at Brat Tech LLC[11] as the software behind an online JSON storage service, that would have been priced by the megabyte, for easy-to-make applications for the enterprise. This venture was located at the web domain "GetAngular.com",[11] and had a few subscribers, before the two decided to abandon the business idea and release Angular as an open-source library" I think here they mention it in the adventures in Angular podcast that Misko took it from a previous company which was a startup between him and another developer that did not went through -> http://devchat.tv/adventures-in-angular/001-aia-the-birth-of-angular-1 http://devchat.tv/adventures-in-angular/001-aia-the-birth-of... It might also have been here or one of the the Javascript Jabber Angular episodes (their search functionality seems to be down for the moment)
  - xpto123 12y ago
    but it was just the bare bones idea, that got expanded a lot in Google.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  If this is true, then still: > after taking it to Google, adding a tone of features to the codebase and using it in internal projects before open sourcing it. Are pretty unique circumstances, that don't really show that it's an easy thing to do usefully/succesfully, for projects that aren't taken into Google, have a ton of features added by paid Google engineers, and then are used by internal projects at google to work out further kinks and cow paths.

buckbova 12y ago

So what now? Did you get a day job? Honestly, there shouldn't be any rush to do anything. You released some good tools, and that's fine.

nirvdrum 12y ago
I came to the realization that Mogotest didn't have a future, at least with me, over the summer. I've evaluated a lot of opportunities in that time. The hardest part being that I didn't really have a clue what I wanted to do. My strategy was to cast a wide net and see if anything excited me. It took a while, but I'm happy to say I joined as a researcher at Oracle Labs working on their JRuby/Truffle implementation. I started this week and while it's early days yet, I feel relieved in a way I haven't in years.
- rexreed 12y ago
  Bummer to hear that, especially as one of the mentors and funders of your Techstars Boston 2010 pool. I only wish that the folks in your pool communicated often and early to the mentors and funders of your Techstars cohort -- we most likely could have helped earlier. Indeed, I think this is the biggest failure I see of startups, regardless of the quality. The seeming inability to reach out for help, guidance, and provide feedback and communicate with others outside their company... especially (and surprisingly) their investors and mentors. Startups - communicate often and early with others.
  - nirvdrum 12y ago
    I had reached out to a few people over the years. Without a doubt, I could have done better. If you'd like to email me, I'd be happy to discuss that aspect more. kevin@<domain_in_article>.
- mappu 12y ago
  Currently the only other downstream comment from this post starts with "Bummer to hear that". So I want to say, congratulations on your new job. It sounds incredibly interesting. I hope you enjoy it, meet new people and learn new things.

johncoltrane 12y ago

Open source… the dumpster of the startup world.

bhouston 12y ago
The quality of open source from startups vary significantly, but so does open source in general.
- forkandwait 12y ago
  The quality of software varies significantly in general, we just get to see the open source.
mahouse 12y ago
This is a very disrespectful comment.
nirvdrum 12y ago
Well, the parts I could integrate with upstream projects, such as Selenium, I already had. Much of the remaining stuff is useful in its domain and small enough in scope where on-going development really shouldn't be necessary. And the parts I thought would essentially be "dumped", I opted not to open source for precisely that reason.
zwetan 12y ago
wow, take a good hard look at what would be the software world without OSS I don't want to go into a rant or anything but really your comment is wrong at so many level dumpster ? as if open source could only result from some failed attempt
stevewilhelm 12y ago
While this comment is poorly expressed, I would guess that the majority of Open Source projects atrophy very quickly. Would be interesting to see how many Github projects have regular monthly updates after 12 months, 24 months, etc.

maaaats 12y ago

What I hate is that some people feel entitled to getting one's hard work for free.

Dylan16807 12y ago
No, that's not the issue. People object to useful IP rotting in the back of a filing cabinet, unused. It's not about getting it free, it's about being able to get it at all. (Some people may want things for free but that's a different issue.)
- tptacek 12y ago
  That objection is a form of entitlement.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes from the reuse of its own previous work.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      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 than that it prevents people from publishing or even talking about publishing for fear of having to deal with entitled strangers arguing with them about what to do with their work. Whatever "good" that sense of entitlement does is, I think, outweighed by the bad. You obviously disagree.
      - c22 12y ago
        But if one subscribes to scrollaway's hypothesis one must conclude that someone cannot conjure anything new out of thin air, that your work does not exist in a vacuum and that "entitled strangers" are not disconnected aliens, but vested shareholders in your cultural genesis.

mindcrime 12y ago

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 and get a new vendor to support them, they have 100% freedom to modify the code and tailor it to their needs if we don't provide what they need, and - if we close up shop - they have options for future support, whether it means supporting it themselves, or paying someone else to do it. But access to the code will never be a problem.

patrickg 12y ago
Plus 100 for this. I've (after one year of business) open sourced my software and this was one of the better moves in my 5 years business history. This opened a lot of doors for me.
nirvdrum 12y ago
Awesome. I think I could have made this more likely by going more service-oriented from the outset. It was a Rails prototype app that kept growing. Eventually new stuff was service-oriented, but far too much was locked up in a monolithic Rails app. In any event, that would have allowed me to still outsource some of the view stuff to proprietary software while being able to open up the core of it. C'est la vie.
jarofgreen 12y ago
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 ...

buro9 12y ago

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-server, single-customer install. We designed it as a platform, and made assumptions along the way. I didn't mind opening the embarrassing code (everyone's shit smells), but the people who were asking all seemed to want a single, well-documented install... and we were having to walk away and go get a day job. We did choose to open it in the end, and you'll find our work here: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ But I only know of a few people who have actually installed it to date (and struggled, because it's not well documented). All of the effort to open-source it just found another set of tyre kickers. Sigh. It's tough. Just letting go. And it's definitely made tougher by wrangling with these questions and trying to do the right thing without investing so much at a time when you're exhausted, broke and likely quite down about things.

nirvdrum 12y ago
Thanks. That's another excellent point. I think I had it in my post outline and just forgot to put it in here. The Mogotest application is complex to set up. For each version of IE you want to test, you need a separate Windows installation with that version of IE. To test Safari and iOS requires provisioning Macs (we used leased minis running VMs on ESXi). And the code itself runs on a Linux cluster. Since our cluster provisioning and deployment was encoded in the project rubber [1] configuration, that complication is somewhat mitigated. But the point remains: the application requires multiple machines across platforms to be remotely useful. [1] -- https://rubber.io/ https://rubber.io/
gfwilliams 12y ago
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!

toddgardner 12y ago

Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust. They loved your product, and proved that the market existed--but it wasn't as big as you thought. When closing down, has anyone explored not completely shuttering the company, but instead continuing to exist as a licensing entity? License the source code itself to your existing customers so that they can continue using it, without all the messiness involved in open sourcing it completely? Probably a terrible idea, but it's what this blog left me thinking.

juhanima 12y ago
Not a terrible idea at all, IMHO. Isn't the core idea of OSS to enable those who use the software to modify it and keep maintaining it? It doesn't mean you have to give it to everyone else as well for free. One reasonable choice would be to give or sell your former paying customers just a raw code dump, with a notification and a disclaimer of all the included license problems and other embarrassement. Giving it for free would of course be an easy way to avoid unnecessary liabilities. Who knows, maybe next they want to buy your services to make fixes and new features? Perhaps they might even be willing to sponsor you in making it a proper open source project. Talk to your customers. They are your most valuable asset. EDIT: continued the natural train of thought
danielweber 12y ago
> Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust. Will "maintaining trust" pay his mortgage? Unless he's going to found another company, that's not very useful for him.
nirvdrum 12y ago
I did think about licensing. There are two big problems with that: 1) The costs of running a single instance of the application far exceed the plans I was selling. It requires a certain amount of amortization to become cost effective for a lot of people. Dealing with Windows and Mac licensing and the hardware required just to get the browsers going, let alone the analysis engine, is too much for most of our customers. 2) Browser vendors pump out releases every 6 weeks. Without some form of ongoing support, the app would become obsoleted in fairly short order. As such, the licensing model only makes sense for those that are comfortable messing around with the source. While the article makes it sound like it's a coupled nightmare, most things are actually laid out very nicely. But, it's still a level of complexity a lot of people aren't going to want to tackle.

barce 12y ago

There's a cost to open sourcing software. I like that the OP pointed that there was software that was sub-licensed and needed to be excised. Netscape took close to a year to open source their browser as Firefox using every significant company resource.

danielweber 12y ago
He should have always been (trying to be) aware of all the licenses he was using from the start. You can't just use any code you find on the net and staple it into your project.
- ahlatimer 12y ago
  There's a difference between knowing "I can use this" and "I can let you use this." Even if he was up to speed on his use of various bits of software, that doesn't mean he was fully aware of whether or not he could sub-license it. In fact, in one of the instances (the theme), he was distinctly aware that he could not sub-license it.
- DatBear 12y ago
  He obviously was aware of the licenses he was using, as he listed them in the post...
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  I was well aware of the licenses. I was optimizing for delivering value to my customers, not for the best way to give everything away should I go out of business. The world of licensing gets considerably more complicated once you decide to distribute it. There are plenty of things I'm free to use in a service capacity because I'm not distributing them. The issue of linking or derived works or license compatibility doesn't come into play for many licenses if you're not actually distributing software. And that says nothing of the commercial products I licensed that I knew I wouldn't be able to sublicense. But, the name of the game was expediency. I liked the theme on WrapBootstrap. I paid ~$20 for it and got up and running in a weekend. Recreating that would have been considerably more effort at significantly more cost. I made a trade-off, as businesses need to do. It's technical debt, one I'm not obligated to pay and don't see the long-term value being worth it.

toolshift 12y ago

Having been through this kind of decision before, this really resonates with me. Especially the pettiness. When your business fails after years of struggle because people didn't want to pay for your software, and those same people make you feel guilty for not supporting the codebase after you can't pay the bills... that breeds the kind of resentment that creates real-life Walter Whites. It's hard to understand the experience unless you've been through it. One thing that came out of it is that now I always try to find a way to pay for the things I use. Especially when I don't have to -- because I know I'm in the minority. And when I don't pay for something and that something goes away, I don't get frustrated anymore. I know i'm getting what I pay for. In short, please pay for your software.

zanny 12y ago
> In short, please pay for your software. I regularly donate to several free software projects (kde, gimp, vlc, firefox, and occasionally others) because they respect my freedom. I strive to avoid proprietary products. If other developers want my money, I want my software freedoms. Those that provide them get money from me. I do understand this is not the norm behavior, and it is awful that it takes developers disrespecting the users of their software to have them pay for it. Just nobody sees the value in software freedom (and yes, even if you cannot write code you benefit from being able to pay any developer to fix your problems, and you can also pay auditors to inspect the code whereas with a proprietary product you are screwed).
- akerl_ 12y ago
  Given that developers prefer not to starve and companies prefer to stay in business, if we're going to switch to a world where software is open source and everybody pays/donates even though the source is there, consumers need to make the change first. As long as consumers don't pay/donate for opensource software, producers cannot afford to pull the ripcord and switch things over, even if they want to.

webaholic 12y ago

AccelerEyes recently did the same with their product arrayfire(github.com/arrayfire), though I cannot tell if they are successful or not.

mkremer90 12y ago

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 you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all. EDIT: Perhaps this is a good place to drop the "challenge" I gave myself and invited other developers to join me a few months ago. DEVELOPERS - I challenge you to spend some money TODAY: https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-stingy/ https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-...

toomuchtodo 12y ago
I'm not a developer, I'm a DevOps admin, so perhaps I don't understand as well as I would if I was a developer (blood, sweat, time, all that jazz). I can see it being rude for people asking you to open source an ongoing concern side-project. But if your startup failed, your application didn't have any value in the marketplace (or you weren't able to execute). As you said: "If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all." If the market doesn't value it, and it failed, why would people pay to open source it?
- mkremer90 12y ago
  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 prices, etc. before they chose to shut down. (You pretty much said this part in your second paragraph, this is the "execution" part.)
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    I believe we're in agreement then!

general_failure 12y ago

Fantastic write up! I have long wondered why failed companies and products just don't throw their code into github. Like google reader which bit me big time.

GnarfGnarf 12y ago

There is a real problem with the perceived value of software. The public sees Google giving everything away, not understanding the underlying business model, and assumes all software has little or no value. Software is not made of physical materials, so why should it be compensated? The public sees Apple apps for 99¢, so shouldn't all software be priced like that? I recently dealt with a customer demanding a free upgrade. She paid $29 nine years ago, and was seething mad at having to pay for an upgrade. How do you deal with that? I'm just looking for an Opens Source banker who will give me an Open Source mortgage.

bonif 12y ago
>I recently dealt with a customer demanding a free upgrade. She paid $29 nine years ago, and was seething mad at having to pay for an upgrade. How do you deal with that? After 15 years in the field (as a consultant) NOW I can say, you just drop the client if she does not want to pay. These people don't value other people's work.
frandroid 12y ago
Ask the customer when was the last time Microsoft gave a free upgrade for Office.
- vxNsr 12y ago
  Sadly, about two weeks ago... If you're asking why sadly: if you're not paying... etc
bjornsing 12y ago
> I'm just looking for an Opens Source banker who will give me an Open Source mortgage. +1 :)

wonjun 12y ago

This is a great post, thanks for sharing!

conundrum 12y ago
How is your comment contributing to discussion?

brador 12y ago

There needs to exist a place to simply dump code with no obligations. One of his minor arguments against open sourcing was having to maintain the code base, and i've heard this from others too. With a dumping ground there would be no such obligation.

brianwawok 12y ago
Why? Dump it in github with the right license, and anyone can fork it.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  One reason is because you'll invariably be criticized for not merging some pull request.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Create an account with a throwaway address, put the project up, then walk away. I have a few projects on Github that aren't under my name because I don't want to be pestered about them, ever. And I never have.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- markbao 12y ago
  Unfortunately, it wouldn't be that easy—and I assume parent commenter is talking about a "code dump" that is not within legal limits. Original author wants to do things by the book: Setting all that aside, open sourcing the codebase is not some trivial process. And I'm not talking wanting to clean up stuff I might be embarrassed by. Here's a non-comprehensive list of issues that need to be addressed: - The web site design was a theme bought on WrapBootstrap that I don't have the rights to sublicense. - The rich UI widgets come from the commercial version of ExtJS. That needs to be excised or the whole project needs to be GPLv3.
12y ago

gfwilliams 12y ago

I actually had a lot of success with Open Sourcing. After a year of making virtually nothing out of selling Espruino as software (while being bombarded with sometimes abusive comments about the fact it wasn't Open), I decided to put it on KickStarter as Open Source hardware a year ago - and the result was very good. My second KickStarter is about to finish in 24 hours too. It's a shame yours didn't work out - I think I was lucky I had something that could be crowdfunded more easily. Having said that, none of the people that berated me for being Open Source have contributed anything back (others have been very helpful though). I've also had to cope with cheap clones, the possibility of competitors using my own software, and a huge support burden from users of other hardware.

gfwilliams 12y ago
Just to add: Overall open source has been great in my case. It's just that it's very easy for someone to make a comment on the internet - it doesn't mean they're particularly bothered about it or are prepared to do anything about it!

fedoreo 12y ago

As a redditor, a gentleman and a scholar, I am somewhat divided on this issue. He lists one of the reasons for not releasing the source as "I swear in code". Profanity would not stop us from using the tech, so please, for the love of all that is holy, release whatever you can. tips fedora

ChuckMcM 12y ago

" I decided to try a crowd-sourced campaign to help with the open sourcing effort. Precisely zero of the companies that have been begging me to open-source the code have contributed in any capacity." Wow, that speaks volumes. Good call on not open sourcing your code.

pnathan 12y ago
Quite agreed! I do believe that we have a duty (c.f., discussion in thread elsewhere) to try to do it, but if it's not that valuable ... meh! let it go, have a drink, chill.
fudged71 12y ago
This is a great use case for crowdfunding!!
cookiecaper 12y ago
I think the same goes for those trying to pressure twitpic's owners to give up all of the company's IP for $15k in bandwidth bills. If it's really an indispensable historical archive, as they claim, surely someone is willing to put up some dough and see that twitpic is fairly compensated for relinquishing control of that archive. This goes double now that Twitter is a public company. The fact of the matter is that twitpic is not considered that valuable, or they'd be able to raise some money for the data dump.
- hobs 12y ago
  As far as I knew, several serious parties affiliated with archive.org offered, contacted them directly, and made plenty of waves to try and buy this capacity. So twitpic might be different, but I agree with the general point: if you care so much and you are making money with it, pay, otherwise go build it yourself.

Kequc 12y ago

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 I managed to sell was preceded by an arduous process of "oh how about this much". Two days before moving out I listed everything I had left for free, which was basically everything. Immediately the phone was off the hook, people were leaving work to come pick up whatever it was. What I'm saying is nobody pays shit for anything.

danielweber 12y ago
I've sometimes experienced the opposite, where no one wants it when it's free, but put a price tag on it and suddenly they have to have it right now. Long ago I volunteered at a food pantry that "sold" food for $1 a bag, because (against what Econ 101 would say) people didn't act as entitled when they were entering a transaction.
- ianlevesque 12y ago
  It also often improves the chances of people taking the food at all, pride/dignity comes into play at all levels.
- zippergz 12y ago
  Before I gave up on Craigslist completely, I had multiple experiences where I offered something nice for free, people quickly replied to claim it, and either never showed up to pick it up, or made it a complete pain in the ass (e.g. the people who showed up at my house at 6AM on a Saturday to get a couch, after having agreed to come at 10AM).
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    That happens when you're selling things, as well. I have an ironclad "no holds" policy these days - no, I won't hold it for you, I don't care that you're literally driving down the highway and are five minutes away - I've waited days for "five minutes away down the street" guys before, and I never will again.

arjie 12y ago

I think this approach is both pragmatic and reasonable. You felt that open-sourcing the code has certain amount of value and the act of open-sourcing has a certain cost. If someone wanted that, they should have funded the crowdsourcing campaign. It didn't work out because it seems everyone asking wanted it for free. That's their problem. You did everything right.

zackmorris 12y ago

Went through a similar experience with a simple puzzle game that relied on a UDP p2p networking library I was working on. I lost 2 years battling NAT and the nondeterministic nature of networking before I had to throw in the towel. I lost a similar amount, perhaps $40,000 in the form of credit card debt. Took me forever to get out from under it and it destroyed my credit, so I haven't used a credit card since 2008, other than a $500 one for medical emergencies. This is a rough business and I'm not sure if I would want to open source the library either. For one thing, we have better replacements now like ZeroMQ and Firebase. Also the idea of giving up on all that work (that I someday may be able to still use) leaves an awful taste in my mouth.

unidano 12y ago

Reddito r here. I bought the full version and will gladly share the experience with my fellow intellectuals on reddit. Bit of feedback: * try not to use too many fonts on the landing page * try to capture audience by utilizing Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" tips fedor a

grahamasdfg 12y ago

Check out reddit.com, a place where we intellectuals gather to discuss science and atheism. M'lady

WhitneyLand 12y ago

Work on letting the pettiness go because it will only make your own emotional recovery more difficult. Honestly, it might take years for you to fully recover mentally but cynicism will just prolong it. If it helps you financially to not open the code because someone may yet still pay or because it saves you time then thats a good choice, don't feel bad one bit about it. But forget people who "should have paid" if it has no relevance now other than to torment you. You also may have an adjustment period as you go back to working for another company. It's weird because you feel like you've already grown out of that yet will be expected to fit in as a corporate soldier. I can offer hope you will eventually see an upside in personal growth. You'll realize that you've gained experience and expertise in running a company that's rare and extremely hard to come by any other way. Good luck on your road to recovery, don't give up.

nirvdrum 12y ago
Thanks for the concern. I've sorta gone through this before. I ran another company (Servprise International) for 4.5 years and went through the adjustment back to a full-time job. The biggest difference is this time I'm older and wanted to think about something I could reasonably see myself doing for 3 - 4 years, at least. I'm actually fairly at ease with things. Making the decision to leave it behind was liberating. Dealing with the BS required to shutdown a company is just annoying. But, the open source question has come up quite a few times. I wanted to give it more than a simple "no" answer and explain why. I feel like it's really a loaded question to ask a start-up that just shutdown, especially when it's not often asked of start-ups still running. I threw the pettiness quip in there to be intellectually honest. Taken out, I don't think it materially changes the decision. But I wanted to address it. I'm human. I certainly have irrational tendencies and I'm rather okay with that. Sure, I'll work on them, but humans aren't perfect automata even if this forum is wont to linking to Wikipedia pages on logical fallacies. Even after challenging that part, I couldn't find a strong enough set of pros to outweigh the cons in spending more time to give it away.

conundrum 12y ago

I see no point in open sourcing a failed startup. That would be equivalent to giving away your car just because your bank decided to take away your home.

zmillman 12y ago

I knew I recognized you from somewhere! For those who don't know, nirvdrum's one of the primary contributors to rubber https://github.com/rubber/rubber https://github.com/rubber/rubber (it's a pretty critical part of our current infrastructure) In my book at least, you've already contributed a huge amount to open source and I wouldn't worry about needing to do more :)

nirvdrum 12y ago
Thanks. I do what I can. And thanks for your contributions to the project over the years :-)

thecynic 12y ago

Is it possible that you failed at commercialization, and now you can't bear the thought that open sourcing your creation might lead to zero stars and forks on Github? Is it possible that the "bombardment of questions" you claim was nothing more than a handful, maybe in the half-dozen or so range, of people who wanted to offer you emotional support because that is free for them to do while paying you for a product they did not want is not? We don't all get immediate success. What matters is perseverance and determination - never giving up. Not making excuses for why the world failed you. You'll never get anywhere that way.

nirvdrum 12y ago
The number of leading and insulting questions here lead me to believe you simply didn't read the post. Go back and take the 15 minutes to actually read it. You'll find most of it answered. And feel free to spend a modicum of effort looking me up to determine to what degree I care about stars on GitHub.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperliner 12y ago
  That took some restraint. You are a nice human being for not responding to that comment like it deserved. I wish I could comment the way I would respond, but I am at work now...Good luck to you.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - nirvdrum 12y ago
    It's an acquired skill :-)
nirvdrum 12y ago
To be clear, since you made another snarky comment that you deleted, I did have paying customers and it was cash-flow positive. But, I couldn't hire a team on current revenues. And given I had bootstrapped a slow-and-steady business, I didn't have that awesome hockey-stick most people lie about, making raising substantially harder. It wasn't some 6 month operation that failed so I pivoted and I didn't piss through investor money. By any objective measure, I was quite dedicated to it -- to the point that I suffer from intense hand pain due to the amount of typing I do daily. At the end of the day, I didn't want to waste away on a slow-but-steady company. I wanted to lighten my load so I didn't need another hand surgery. I wanted to spend more time with 1.5 year old child. And I wanted to work with smart people learning new stuff. But, by all means, take a single sentence intentionally devoid of context and continue to extrapolate.

biomimic 12y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo

stevewilhelm 12y ago

I would offer your clients the chance to purchase a software license and send along a list of DevOps contractors you would recommend. You might make some money, your clients will appreciate the offer, and your DevOps friends make gain a client. Win, win, win.

kasparloog 12y ago

I'm the competitor nirvdrum was mentioning (Browserbite). We had a very nice founder-to-founder talk and we have gone through quite a few of the same failures that he has. I have all the respect for nirvdrum. Most people don't manage to hang on that long. To be honest, I was sorry to see mogotest go, because it shows that there might not be any business in cross browser testing. But there is! In my eyes it was a valid effort on all fronts - trying to build a community and handling lots of browser vendor irregularities. He was one of the first ones. But the market wasn't there, yet. Good luck! The cross browser testing space will miss him!

deepsearch 12y ago

One word: music

deepsearch 12y ago

One word: music

patio11 12y ago

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.

nirvdrum 12y ago
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.

zb 12y ago

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.