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Comment by toddgardner | Hacker News Reader

Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust. They loved your product, and proved that the market existed--but it wasn't as big as you thought.

When closing down, has anyone explored not completely shuttering the company, but instead continuing to exist as a licensing entity? License the source code itself to your existing customers so that they can continue using it, without all the messiness involved in open sourcing it completely?

Probably a terrible idea, but it's what this blog left me thinking.

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I did think about licensing. There are two big problems with that:

1) The costs of running a single instance of the application far exceed the plans I was selling. It requires a certain amount of amortization to become cost effective for a lot of people. Dealing with Windows and Mac licensing and the hardware required just to get the browsers going, let alone the analysis engine, is too much for most of our customers.

2) Browser vendors pump out releases every 6 weeks. Without some form of ongoing support, the app would become obsoleted in fairly short order.

As such, the licensing model only makes sense for those that are comfortable messing around with the source. While the article makes it sound like it's a coupled nightmare, most things are actually laid out very nicely. But, it's still a level of complexity a lot of people aren't going to want to tackle.

I know that I'll sound like patio11, but have you tried charging more?

I mean, you have clients, that value your software. You have bills to pay. Do the clients value it more than the bills you pay? Why don't you try to discover that?

> Giving your customers a soft landing is really important to maintain trust.

Will "maintaining trust" pay his mortgage? Unless he's going to found another company, that's not very useful for him.

Not a terrible idea at all, IMHO. Isn't the core idea of OSS to enable those who use the software to modify it and keep maintaining it? It doesn't mean you have to give it to everyone else as well for free.

One reasonable choice would be to give or sell your former paying customers just a raw code dump, with a notification and a disclaimer of all the included license problems and other embarrassement. Giving it for free would of course be an easy way to avoid unnecessary liabilities.

Who knows, maybe next they want to buy your services to make fixes and new features? Perhaps they might even be willing to sponsor you in making it a proper open source project.

Talk to your customers. They are your most valuable asset.

EDIT: continued the natural train of thought

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