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Ask HN: Considering open sourcing our web service
8 points by s89 on Nov 30, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
We're two students who have built an appointment planning service next to our studies. It's at http://www.pleft.com/. While it duplicates some functionality from Doodle, we've got many comments from people who prefer our interface and we enjoy exploring new possibilities.

Our site doesn't generate any income, and neither a lot of visitors. We don't have much time on our hands to improve and promote the site anymore. Since we don't want the project to die and still hope for it be successful, we're considering to open source it.

It would be the first open source project in this category. We hope to get enthusiastic programmers or companies to join us. We'd release the Django and Google Closure app and libraries, accept patches and keep hosting an instance on our server.

Do you have any advice? Should we give our code away? Are there ways to make sure that potential contributors find us?




Consider Open Sourcing it as AGPL. In case some company ever does decide to customize it heavily and monetize, they'll be forced to commit upstream or purchase a different license from you.


This is the type of app that is useful but people won't pay for. Good candidate for open sourcing.




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