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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see some of these projects simply go open source, or have an 'open for offers' time for other companies to bid on taking over operations. I'm sure many people (myself included) would be happy to keep services like this running, instead of simply turning the lights out and putting the code in the trash.

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Acquisitions take time. And money. If you're running out of both, the risk of undertaking a long and expensive process, that may result is nothing is risky, and in some cases illegal (taking on debt [legal fees on terms] that you can't reasonably pay = trading while insolvent).

I'm not suggesting at all that in this instance the company was in such a state, but often I've seen founders run it right to the line believing things will turn around, and they don't. At that point, there is no reasonable way to sell the assets or ownership of the company easily.

I've always wondered why more companies don't do this. I mean sure, if you've got a buyout offer then I can see why you might not want to open source your work, but in the case of a standard shut down, it'd certainly be better to let people get some use out of your work rather than none.

> I'm sure many people (myself included) would be happy to keep services like this running

Why don't you then? Send an email saying you're willing to donate whatever it costs to keep the servers running.

Yeah. Thought so.

A thousand people running various size instances of the service versus a single company running it for everyone has significantly different cost properties, for each involved party

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