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Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

This analogy seems to be describing a different principle. Microsoft was trying to break the network effect that Lotus had.

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I agree it's not a 1-to-1 analogy, but the idea is the same. Knowing you're free to come back to Lotus by using Excel frees you from the chicken-and-egg constraint of waiting until your entire office is on Excel. With NewsBlur you know that you can host your own instance if your dependency on the newsblur.com hosted instance breaks.

I see what you mean by that, but open-sourcing all your software instead of just having an export function seems risky to me.

In our area of business, our features get copied really quickly.

You can still copy the feature without looking at the code. Sometimes its even preferable.

It might be risky, but there are a lot of other companies that are doing exactly the same thing and and have shown a great path for newsblur.... (for example, wordpress, sugar-crm, etc).

An export function is hardly the same thing. We're not talking about the concern that an RSS client might go away. There's no shortage of clients. No-one worries too much about those. The concern is what happens when the service goes away.

This analogy only helps for developers that would be comfortable installing and operating their own instance. I don't see many folks being excited about the opportunity for personal use.

For other folks hoping to build their own service, commercially or otherwise, having access to your code provides a huge savings in time to market.

You would be better off by just copying features and writing your own code than taking NewsBlur's highly coupled code and trying to forge your own business out of it. I think they reserve that task for developers sent to hell.

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