Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I imagine Mailbox has a heavy server component, which would be non-trivial to get set up and running on your own.



If you're looking for an alternative, we built one at Nylas. :) https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine


Nylas looks awesome. Has anyone built a plugin for it that allows for "message snoozing"? That was the real ingenuity with Mailbox IMO.


Not yet! Totally something that we'd love to see, though.


That's hardly a reason to not open-source. You're not required to provide support just because you release your source code. Even a dump of their repositories would be useful for people who are interested in Mailbox.


No; but often the server components are heavily tied to some other proprietary libraries that they're not ready to open source. They could remove all proprietary code from their codebase, but that costs money - likely more than they were willing to spend on this product.

Unless open source is part of your marketing strategy (which means the effort would have a budget), it's really difficult to open source an existing commercial application.


That's a speculation on your part.. and PR spin-off on theirs.

Nobody asked them to support it, or whatever. Just dump the damn thing online so others can pick up and continue to "help fight your inbox to zero".

Clearly their intention here was profits and since they didn't see any - they kill it off. They won't do it so nobody else should try to safe email either.

I wanted to get my company (over 3,000 users) off DropBox long time ago after each update comes with new issues. But this just broke camel's back. I will make the switch happen this weekend.


> Clearly their intention here was profits and since they didn't see any - they kill it off. They won't do it so nobody else should try to safe email either.

Um, of course their intentions were profit? Dropbox is a for-profit company, nobody ever questioned their intentions as being anything else.

And it's not pure speculation; I've worked on enough internally-developed products to know it's not always feasible to open source an entire service offering after the fact. It's expensive enough to do between code scrubbing, legal reviews, etc. that you're generally only going to do it for strategic reasons (i.e. you know you can never make money doing it but want to commoditize the market space to hamper a competitor's growth, you want the community to help support your infrastructure, or your business model is open source + support).


"That's a speculation on your part"

Whereas your post is speculation on yours.

"Nobody asked them to support it"

At the same time, if they do open source it, people are going to see that it was once Dropbox, and any issues they see with it are going to be seen as the fault of Dropbox.

"Just dump the damn thing online"

Far more work than it sounds like.

"Clearly their intention here was profits"

They are a company with bills to pay and engineers to pay, right?

"They won't do it so nobody else should try to safe email either."

I don't see them going around and killing other people's email clients.


Honestly most startup backend systems are not amazingly engineered or something to be proud of, so I would guess that the code would need some considerable work before releasing it to the public if that is what they chose to do. Even after release, the project would need considerable support to get it off the ground (helping the first users, accepting contributions, establishing the project community and leadership). Simply dumping the code on Github with no instructions and leaving it to rot is not particularly useful.


Then OS the previous version that got them purchased by Dropbox.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: