
Open Sourcing a Failed Startup - nirvdrum
http://nirvdrum.com/2014/11/20/open-sourcing-mogotest.html
======
buro9
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.

~~~
gfwilliams
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!

~~~
buro9
> the end I'm much happier that buro9 found a way to keep it ticking over

It's worth noting for people that don't know, that I ate my own dogfood. The
communities and forums I run are now hosted on Microcosm.

So when we were facing the "What next?" moment, I knew I had to install and
setup my own instance of the platform just to give my users an uninterrupted
service.

What I did, was for every customer already on the platform who had stuck with
us, loved what we'd done... I offered them space on my instance.

I never wanted to leave even a single customer in the lurch. I think it sucks
that startups do, especially if a way can be found.

------
mkremer90
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-...](https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-stingy/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
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
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.)

~~~
dethstar
>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.

~~~
aragot
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.

------
ChuckMcM
_" 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.

~~~
cookiecaper
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
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.

------
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.

~~~
nirvdrum
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.

------
GnarfGnarf
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.

~~~
frandroid
Ask the customer when was the last time Microsoft gave a free upgrade for
Office.

~~~
vxNsr
Sadly, about two weeks ago...

If you're asking why sadly: if you're not paying... etc

------
Kequc
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.

~~~
jpollock
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 sold for more than I expected, dramatically so (frequently more
than replacement cost). Even better, when people came to pick up their
purchases, they were invariably _happy_ about it!

Going back, I compared my results with those of the same items on the site, my
$1 item outsold them.

It helped that ads with pictures, $1 reserve and paid placement got
preferential placement.

Things to do:

    
    
      1) Put some effort into the copy.
      2) Track down the user's guide.
      3) Track down a product review.
      4) Take pictures - Make sure they are in focus!
      5) Show the label indicating model number clearly.
      6) Answer all questions promptly.  
      7) If people ask for Buy Now price, decline. :)
      8) Pay to be top of the results!
    

I also learned that 50% of the bids arrived in the last day.

~~~
iandanforth
I'm really interested in this, any chance you have the hard numbers on what
you spent vs what you made? Marketing is a skill that I'm not great at so this
kind of explicit example is very helpful.

~~~
solistice
Honestly, if you want advice on selling items such as furniture or personal
items online, you might want to ask in one of the flipping comunities like
/r/flipping on reddit. They don't usually try to get rid of their own stuff,
but they sell stock from yard sales, thrift stores craiglist offers, retail
arbitage, ect. In fact, you might have drawn some flippers with your free
offer. They're usually quite helpful if you ask concrete questions ,
especially regarding presenting your wares, and there'll proably be members
who can tell you what percentage of their revenue goes to shipping and other
fees.

[[http://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/wiki/index](http://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/wiki/index)]

~~~
iandanforth
Thanks! I'd never heard of /r/Flipping and the direct link to the wiki was
very useful.

------
toolshift
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
> 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_
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.

------
WhitneyLand
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
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.

------
mindcrime
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.

~~~
jarofgreen
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 ...

~~~
nirvdrum
By all means, quote away. Writing this was cathartic for me. If it helps
others, even better.

------
kasparloog
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!

------
toddgardner
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.

~~~
nirvdrum
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.

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

~~~
Dylan16807
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
That objection is a form of entitlement.

~~~
scrollaway
No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes
from the reuse of its own previous work.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
rudolf0
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?

~~~
nirvdrum
Setting aside the licensing issues, and assuming it's just because I don't
feel like dealing with obnoxious people, something still doesn't make sense to
me. Prior to announcing the shutdown, no one had access to the source. I've
made a lot of it available since then, but not all of it. Today, they still
don't have access to that source. How is society any worse off?

Unless your belief is simply that all code should be open source. And that's
fine, but then it doesn't really seem tied to the shutdown of the company.

~~~
rudolf0
No, I don't think all code should be open source at all.

Humanity isn't worse off for it if you don't release the source, but you could
_potentially_ make humanity better off by releasing it. If you keep it to
yourself forever, never to be used or seen again, you reduce the chance of
helping someone's project or improving someone's life to 0%.

If you do release it, there's that chance that a few people out there will
borrow some of its ideas to help them out, or perhaps they'll actually use the
entire codebase so they don't reinvent the wheel. This could save them a lot
of time and effort. Or maybe a non-coder will use it because they genuinely
want to use the app. And who knows, maybe it'll be a lot more than a few
people.

It's just a bit existentially sad to essentially lock all that code produced
out of so many man hours in a little sphere that is never opened again.

For a good example of this, look at Isaac Newton's unreleased works.

If you really don't want to appease obnoxious beggars from companies, you can
just release it with a license that restricts all, or certain kinds, of
commercial use.

------
barce
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
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.

~~~
nirvdrum
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.

------
hw
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
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
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
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...](http://devchat.tv/adventures-in-
angular/001-aia-the-birth-of-angular-1)

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)

------
gfwilliams
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
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!

------
zackmorris
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.

------
general_failure
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.

------
zmillman
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
Thanks. I do what I can. And thanks for your contributions to the project over
the years :-)

------
arjie
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.

------
buckbova
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
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.

~~~
mappu
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.

~~~
nirvdrum
Thanks! I don't think the other comment was meant to be negative. It was a
bummer to shut it down. And it's one of those events you sorta relive every
time you talk to someone. "Hey, how's the company doing?" Fortunately, I've
gotten a lot of those out of the way by now :-)

So far, the new gig has been great. I was extremely reticent to join such a
massive company, but it's the sort of work virtually no start-up would ever be
able to justify spending resources on. The change of pace and the new
experience should be worthwhile. And rather than working in a silo, I'm
surrounded by some of the top people in their respective fields. It's ...
different :-)

------
zb
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.

------
brador
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
Why? Dump it in github with the right license, and anyone can fork it.

~~~
nirvdrum
One reason is because you'll invariably be criticized for not merging some
pull request.

~~~
danielweber
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.

------
stevewilhelm
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.

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

------
wonjun
This is a great post, thanks for sharing!

------
biomimic
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXz80LnDjo)

------
deepsearch
One word: music

------
thecynic
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
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.

~~~
beachstartup
don't let armchair quarterback assholes get to you. the beauty of
entrepreneurship is it was your decision to start, and your decision to stop.
you don't need to justify it to anyone but yourself.

the experience of having founded and run a company for 5 years is a skill that
will be valuable. put it on your resume and sell it as experience few others
have, because that's true.

~~~
nirvdrum
Thanks. Without a doubt, one of my biggest weaknesses is taking troll bait.

------
johncoltrane
Open source… the dumpster of the startup world.

~~~
bhouston
The quality of open source from startups vary significantly, but so does open
source in general.

~~~
forkandwait
The quality of software varies significantly in general, we just get to see
the open source.

