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Comment by traverseda | Hacker News Reader

My only note is that it would be nice if it was open sourced before the servers shut down, so that if there were any users who were dependent on it they have time to make a transition.

Still, releasing it is already much better than 98% of companies in this space, and I'd definitely be inclined to use other products by this person because of it.

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The concern may be that there could be undiscovered vulnerabilities in the service and releasing the source before shutdown could make it easier for malicious actors to discover those vulnerabilities and compromise user data.

Yes, that's the rationale. A customer has asked about getting access to the source ahead of time and I'll try to make that work.

As I mentioned in another comment, perhaps you could invite current users to a private repo, and then make it public at the business EOL.

If it’s open source, a private repo is not protection. Free software licenses allow for unlimited redistribution.

You don’t need to apply the license until after the public release, before then it would just be sharing code with your customers under whatever agreement you want

Given your setup would it be easy to make a data exporter/importer? That way you could give them the data and shut down before opening the source.

Placemark was built around that idea - all the data is easily exportable & importable in many open formats. It should be straightforward to move to the open source version or other tools.

Fair point. Perhaps if it's such an issue for someone, and they see this news, then they can reach out to Tom to try to remedy it - and perhaps help him test out the open source provided to make sure everything's peachy?

He seems like the type of guy to be willing to reasonable and considerate like this.

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