Don’t die, donate
Posted on | December 22, 2008 |
I’m guessing no one have missed the streak of web startups that has ended up in the deadpool lately. Amongst others Pownce, iwantsandy and Mixwit has twittered for the last time and this is of course sad although a natural development of business. Especially in times of recession. However, there is a chance for these companies to leave something behind, something that matters and that can power others in their mission to help users share, remember things and make playlists.
It was at the last Likemind meetup in Berlin that me, Peter Bihr and Jodi Church discussed the idea of making a company’s intellectual property available before fading away. If you’re a software company this means releasing your code. Yes, i’m aware that it’s not a totally uncontroversial thing to do but think about it. What would you rather want, that all you’ve designed and built is for nothing or help another startup or project and be credited for it?
The ways of sharing code today are numerous and there are many different licenses and copyright laws you can release it under. I’m for example a big fan of Git and GitHub and think it’s a fantastic way of making code available for others. But remember, code does not last forever so act while it’s still fresh.
Turns out (of course) that we are not the only ones thinking like this. Mixwit says in their blog that they are considering donating all of their code to the distributed Muxtape replacement OpenTape. Great idea guys, I say go ahead!
If you know more deadpooled projects where this has been done please write a comment.
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January 25th, 2009 @ 14:41
When Room 33 closed their doors in 2002 they released their WAP portal software, Hambo as open source (albeit under their own license, which seem to be similiar to the old BSD-license.
However, it seems that the project never became really active, and now it must be considered dead.