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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

"Is now open source!" is the new hot way to say "We quit." Open sourcing software you decided not to bother maintaining anymore is better than nothing, yes, but without a community devoted enough to it to keep it up to date, it's not much better than dead and gone.

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This is a lot of negativity considering that when companies shut down products there are often many outcries of "just open source it so at least someone else can work on it if they want to". Shutting down like this should be applauded and encouraged.

A lot of people have responded that way to what I wrote, but I didn't really mean it as negativity. I'm glad that they opened it before abandoning it, but I'm trying to emphasize that that is at best a first step for this project. Without someone willing to follow up by maintaining it, it's still dead. The tone of these announcements lately has not reflected that reality.

Not that new, Xara, Watcom, and Palm’s Binder among others are much earlier examples, but this particular spin seems to be recent. While I dislike it as much as I do any other instance of spin, in terms of preservation I’d argue it is much better than dead and gone. It’s hilariously hard to find some pieces of 20-year-old-software, even those from major, still-extant publishers that were freely redistributable and supposedly mirrored all over various FTP sites (anybody got a copy of Wx86[1] for the Alpha? :). I shudder to think how hard it’s going to be to locate things from this era of online updates and no download links a decade or two hence.

[1] http://retro.ircx.net.pl/nt/mips/wx86/

I don't know why you're framing that like a bad thing. I'd love if it became an industry standard. Even if no one decides to maintain it, at least there's an option, rather than taking the software to the grave.

I thought you were being overly-negative, but:

> Bonsai Browser is no longer being actively developed, but contributions are welcome

I wonder if that almost guarantees "my PR has been open 3 years without action" :-(

Time to fork...

Open sourcing a software you have no intention to maintain is definitely better than keeping it closed source and preventing its distribution. If copyright laws weren't so screwed up a law / regulation could have been made mandating that all software / code that is no longer being maintained should be automatically open sourced (or become automatically open source after 20-25 years).

> Open sourcing software you decided not to bother maintaining anymore is better than nothing

Sometimes our only option is between two awful choices. I’m grateful they open-sourced. Browsers are hard.

> Browsers are hard.

I'm guessing that's why this is in electron, thus I'm guessing it's for browsing something but isn't a "web browser": https://github.com/Bonsai-Desk/bonsai-browser/blob/2d7a08568...

ed: I just saw the loom URL below, so it's as much a "web browser" as embedding an ancient version of electron can be. Good for those who want both old software and lack of extensions, I guess

I don't mind. For me the product has just begun existing.

Maybe companies considering quitting should try open-sourcing before they shut down and see what good will and free marketing it yields.

Whenever I start a project I usually look for some open source equivalent for inspiration even if it's not maintained. We opened up bonsai in case someone else comes along and wants to understand how we did a few things. There are some fun hacks we had to do to make certain things work around overlaying the main window on macOS that might be helpful for other electron apps.

The number of times a company shutting down and a software no longer being available has completely broken my workflow, this should be a requirement.

I think in all of my years in software only one customer has ever demanded that we keep our code in escrow.

And the interesting thing about arrangements like that is that there's usually some extra money involved in such an arrangement, enough that we might turn a little profit off of it, reducing the odds that the customer ever needs to use that clause.

Thankfully, it's MIT licensed and someone can innovate on top of this.

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