

Ask HN: Why don't failed startups share their source code? - raldu

If startups really are about creating value by &quot;building something that users love&quot;, 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?
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giaour
It'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.

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NathanKP
Most 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.

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hga
In 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.

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angdis
If 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.

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icedchai
Have you seen many commercial code bases? Most of the code is crap. Most value
is taken from looking at the mistakes and building V2.

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cblock811
Part 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)

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codegeek
Everyblock did that when they failed.

[http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/06/30/source/](http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/06/30/source/)

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Giorgi
Well some of them do, but some of them hope to re-sell it.

