On apps that get acquired | Hacker News Reader

On apps that get acquired

inessential.com

28 pointsgbugniot10 comments

> You also can’t go by whether or not it’s open source, because open source apps get abandoned.

But if it's open source, you can (FSVO "can", depending on your skillset) fix critical problems yourself.

Let's say I get Mailborg for $10 and move my mail over to it. Mailborg gets acquired. Dropborg eventually closes Mailborg. Next month, Apple releases OS X 10.12 and something breaks. I'm SOL.

Or I get open-source Thunderborg. Borgzilla stops development of Thunderborg. Next month, Apple releases OS X 10.12, and something breaks.

No matter. I'm still not SOL. Either I have a chance of fixing it, or more likely, someone smarter than me will find a fix and post it, maybe even with a new binary.

I'm no Stallmanite, but this is the whole origin myth of free software, for goodness' sake.

More practically, you can pay someone to fix those problems for you. This someone doesn't need to be related to the original authors in any way, and you can even put out a competitive bid open to the whole world.

Chances are still pretty low, however. I used to be a long-time open source maintainer, and I definitely found (based on my own experience, and the experience of others trying to get started on projects I've worked on) that the barrier to entry to almost any non-trivial code base is fairly high. And debugging is usually more difficult than adding a new feature.

Open source communities also don't "just happen". It's pretty rare for someone to throw some code in a GitHub responsibility, wander off, and later find that it's suddenly become actively (or even passively) maintained.

Unless it's an app that's mission-critical to my life and there aren't any alternatives (even if they're not as good), I can't see myself digging in to fix bugs. And even then, it still feels like a hard sell.

I also feel like most apps that people might love enough to even consider diving into also have server components. If the company running the service shuts down, that's another barrier to setting up your own (assuming the backend pieces were even open sourced too!).

Sure, it happens, but those tend to be very very exceptional cases.

One of those great exception is Erherpad. The open source base helped launch a community then a full rewrite. Hopefully the hackpad fork will now be merged or at least some features will be back ported.

It really depends on how big the community is. HackPad was open sourced; it hasn't been touched in months.

The advantage of an open-source app is that there will almost always be a way to get your data out of the application/service if it does shut down.

With closed-source/proprietary apps, you're at the mercy of the provider for getting out any data.

It would be great if any/all of these developers/companies can guarantee the app will be around for X days / years after the user buys it. Then it's a contract and you wont feel bad/betrayed once the app is gone (acquisition/bankrupt etc)

They can always end of life it after their last sale.

This guarantees the user that it's worth the time/investment, and the company can always decide to prolong the contract / expiration date.

Software (Best if used by X/XX/XXXX)

Good points here, but let's have a quick look at the examples provided here:

> There are some companies you can rely on: Bare Bones, Panic, and Omni (my employer), for instance.

Hmm. Panic killed its early MP3 player Audion not long after Apple started shipping iTunes in their OS for free [1]. And Omni has allowed their once mind-blowingly great web browser OmniWeb [2] to wither; though theoretically still in development, only "test builds" of the latest version have been available for years, and it doesn't even have its own page on Omni's site anymore.

The author's point - that software companies discontinuing software sometimes is a thing that happens regardless of other factors - still stands, but the companies the author cites as counter-examples are not themselves flawless.

[1]: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

[2]: https://www.omnigroup.com/more

Those are two cherry picked extreme examples in the sense that both Audion and OmniWeb were fighting for markets that Apple moved into in a big way. However, I think Brent picking any companies at all as "examples of the good guys" undermines his larger point.

Also OmniGraphSketcher, a wonderful and unique utility that Omni divested from. Kindly, they open-sourced it;[0] sadly, the project shows no activity since last year and would seem to be abandoned.[1]

[0] https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/setting-omnigraphsketcher-fre...

[1] https://github.com/graphsketcher/GraphSketcher

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