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Ask HN: Why don't failed startups share their source code?
If startups really are about creating value by "building something that users love", conditions in the market alone would not be enough to dictate any possible impact a startup might have. By liberating the source code, any failed project would have a better chance of surviving rather than just disappearing into oblivion. Yet it is surprising there are no GitHub repos for many failed startups. And this is despite startups revolving around a culture that value and benefit from free source code. Any ideas?
- giaour 11y agoIt's a lot of work to get a code base publishable. You need to audit every file to make sure you're not including any proprietary code or access keys, then replace those keys with configurable variables and that proprietary code with an open-source alternative.
- icedchai 11y agoHave you seen many commercial code bases? Most of the code is crap. Most value is taken from looking at the mistakes and building V2.
- NathanKP 11y agoMost startups that fail wrote code extremely quickly and have a cobbled together system that the devs would be ashamed to open source. There may even be private keys and sensitive info in the code base itself. Additionally if the failure was an acquihire, or a sale of the business assets to a competitor then the code base probably belongs to someone else now, even if it will never be used or see the light of day again. Even if the code is in a state where it could be open sourced legally and safely it would probably be next to useless to anyone but the devs that wrote it. This is because most startups don't tend to write proper documentation, because their small teams can rely on institutional knowledge. (Unless the startup is extremely professional with some truly top notch engineers powering it the documentation effort tends to start sometime after the startup scales to a mid sized team and now requires it.) But when a startup dissolves all that brain space info about how the service works, the endpoints, etc disappears. What you are left with is an undocumented mess that could probably be rewritten from scratch better and faster.
- codegeek 11y agoEveryblock did that when they failed. http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/06/30/source/ http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/06/30/source/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- angdis 11y agoIf the start-up has received funding by venture capital, the IP of the failed start-up is OWNED by the investors. These investors may chose to license it to other firms and/or transfer any patents to a patent troll company for a few bucks. They might also just sit on it. Whatever the case, this stuff isn't casually up-for-grabs. If you want it, perhaps track down the original founders and start a dialog.
- hga 11y agoIn the corporate failures I've witnessed first hand, someone owned the source code, be it investors or whoever won the bid in a Chapter 7 liquidation auction. In the former case, they generally had an unrealistic hope they could still made something of it, in the latter, it's cleared long after the company is out of business, and in either case it would take work from someone who's been let go, or a "software archaeologist", to even put it up on GitHub, let alone decide what can be legally released.
- cblock811 11y agoPart of it also goes to the passion of the founders. At Zillabyte we really did want to build something people would love. I don't know what the conversations were with our investors afterwards, but I saw there was a partial release of our code on Github. If you have any interest in distributed computing go take a look. If I were more technical I would have started building onto it myself to keep the mission going. https://github.com/zillabyte https://github.com/zillabyte
- Giorgi 11y agoWell some of them do, but some of them hope to re-sell it.