Comment by clarkevans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clarkevans | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting idea (I applaud the effort) -- the devil is in the details.

For starters, if your shop closes their door... you are likely doing it because you ran out of money/time. Why would you go through the effort to package your work as open source code and help users figure it out?

Second, you can't just say "open source". You should specify a license, or at the very least say: "under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative".

Third, what exactly is open sourced? Are their proprietary services you use, did you license these for your users?

I suppose, if you want to make this promise, you could publish your entire stack on GitHub and put it under a license that its time-boxed: "If for any reason XXX stops operation, this source is released under the MIT; tell then, you may copy it only for archival purposes". But, in this case, what constitutes as "stopping operations"? What happens in an acquisition where the parent company is interested in some parts of the technology you built?

UPDATE: Edited to directly respond to _their_ effort to make this Guarantee to their users.

Open source is not the best way to call this.

This is more of a simplified version of the software escrow agreement, where you continuously push your code base to a trusted third-party in case your company goes belly-up.

I had to deal with a software escrow in the past, and this is a smart alternative to it - if the customer agrees. There is clearly less protection though.

Sounds very interesting :) Will investigate the alternative. Thanks for the feedback!

(I'm the one that wrote the blog post)

Thank you for your awesome feedback. I believe that this could be done fairly easy with UserApp. We've built the system using well-known technology and standards and haven't bought any third-party software that has been integrated into our code.

The clause is not clear about everything. The code would of course be released in the same state as when we are developing in it. If of any reason we would have to close down, why would we want to make it hard for our customers? In that case we would probably give it out as an AWS instance together with instructions and documentation.

And you are right about the open-source license - we definitely need to clarify that. It will probably be under MIT.

>What happens in an acquisition where the parent company is interested in some parts of the technology you built?

One solution would be to not sell the company for the technology only. And the clause mentioned in the blog post is only valid if there is no intent of further operation. An acquisition would be considered as intent.

The purpose is to make our customers that depend on us to feel comfortable knowing that the service would still be available for them in another form whatever happens to UserApp.

User accounts stored in Redis. Not to complain about Redis, I love it. But I wouldn't store my user accounts in either Redis or MongoDB.

Everything depends on configuration. Redis can be very durable/reliable if configured accordingly.

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