1) why not open source the project?
2) why not look for someone to take it over and run it?
I also have a hard time seeing how something like this could be at the very least not break-even (unless they had less than 10 paying customers or something).
Hi,
Thanks for your interest in Grove.
Unfortunately we won't be open sourcing the code due to the time and effort it would take to prepare and maintain it.
Thanks for understanding,
Leah
Not that I'm saying they have to release it (I respect their right to do whatever they want with their own work), but as far as reasons to not release something, that's pretty weak.
I'll hack on it a bit more tonight, but it shouldn't be too difficult to replicate what Grove.io does.
Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other potential customers are unaware.
There is a demand for this type of service. Real-time chat is in extremely high demand still. Chat was the number one requested feature a "build-you-own" social network startup I worked at a handful of years ago even before Facebook added their chat.
Moving our team off of Grove was a bigger pain then dealing with the sporadic mini-outages so we put up with it longer then smaller teams or most companies. We really liked the feature set but just needed the product to be more stable. The writing has been on the wall for a few months as doing a twitter search will show the lack of a response for a few months now.
If they're shutting it down because it isn't sustainable, that's fine, I don't expect them to run the service as a charity (we have freenode for that!) - but that doesn't seem to be the case.