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Comment by cpitman | Hacker News Reader

I wish people wouldn't use "we open sourced it" as a synonym for "this product is dead". Especially for a SaaS company, there is a totally valid business strategy in open sourcing your codebase but continuing to provide a paid SaaS offering for users that are not interested in self-hosting.

It causes confusion every time a company open sources their software. Always have to wonder, "Is it dead and they are yeeting it over the fence?"

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To be fair, the email they sent to their newsletter list is more succinct and clear about their services shutting down:

>>>

This will be the last email you ever receive from Actual. You are receiving this because you are a subscriber or have used Actual in the past.

Actual is moving to an open-source model and will be 100% free.

This means our subscription syncing service will be shutting down in the future. We have instructions for setting up your own server, letting you completely own your data and have syncing for free.

Read more details about how this effects you in the full blog post: https://actualbudget.com/open-source

Even that part is kind of misleading. Making the software open source doesn't mean that the subscription service has to shut down; those are two different decisions.

But maybe we don't have to be too critical. I tend to read "[project you've never heard of] is going open-source" as "here's a new project you might want to check out", but even if they really mean that the project is mostly shutting down, open sourcing it is a good thing to do.

I don't necessarily interpret it as a synonym, more that these are two events that naturally coincide. IMO it's better to decide to open source a product when it dies than to annihilate it. If nothing else, people may be able to learn something from the source.

I agree, better to open source a product then to just let it die off. I just wish companies were honest in their headline ("this product didn't work out, here's the source") instead of trying to spin it.

Any examples of companies that opened previously closed source that continued to offer that product?

I work for Red Hat, we do it all the time. We often acquire closed source companies and then release the software as open-source, while continuing to offer it.

I believe the most recent example was Stackrox, open sourced March 31st. The "productized" version is Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security. https://www.stackrox.io/blog/open-source-stackrox-is-now-ava...

The web framework Remix was closed source and available only to license purchasers for about a year, until they announced their seed funding in October of last year: https://remix.run/blog/seed-funding-for-remix#open-source

The Canvas LMS: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

Canvas was open source from the start. Schools have always been able to run their own instance, but most just pay Instructure to do it.

It wasn't open source at the beginning. (I know, I was there.) We open-sourced it early on, but it started as closed-source software.

Blender 3D might be one of the more well-known success stories in that regard. Godot game engine also perhaps? Gotta be more'n a few others as well, I'm sure. Those are just two that instantly come to mind for me (being a couple of my favorites that were both closed source at one time in their history and have gone on to massive and continual success since their open sourcing).

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