Why don't companies feel comfortably "code dumping"? Just throw everything online as a tarball, and say "we aren't supporting this and we don't want to have anything to do wit h this, but here's the source."
DataJoy Co-founder here. A lot of the DataJoy code IS available (https://github.com/sharelatex/web-sharelatex/tree/datajoy). Our other product ShareLaTeX has an open-source version that you can run locally and is very similar to the version we host at sharelatex.com. DataJoy naturally shares a lot of code with ShareLaTeX (if you look at the two products, you'll see they're very similar). However, with DataJoy, we never got the product to a stage where we felt it made sense to invest time into 'good open source' (documentation, installation guides, etc), but the 'code dump open source' version has always been there.
The main thing that isn't open source with DataJoy is our backend for running code. At the moment this is so tied into Docker, S3, and how we deploy it in our infrastructure, that I don't think it would be much use to anyone else. The innovations here have been in how we deploy and provision it, not in the code itself.
> Why don't companies feel comfortably "code dumping"? Just throw everything online as a tarball, and say "we aren't supporting this and we don't want to have anything to do wit h this, but here's the source."
- It may contain configuration information.
- It may contain private keys or passwords.
- It may contain customer specific code (if you maintain customer specific features either via feature toggles or branches), which may leak information of your paying customers.
- It may have unintended copyright violations.
- It may contain software that is licensed in a way that makes it a copyright violation to distribute your software outside or your company (publishing it is distributing it). This may also apply if you distribute your sources without any (source or binary) parts of the proprietary dependency.
- It may fall under the export restrictions for cryptographic software (these have been mainly dropped, but not completely).
- It may directly or indirectly make your patent violations public (oh, you have them already, but nobody knows about them).
- It's of embarrassing quality.
- It may make it public that your company has defrauded its customers / and or users.
- It may make it public that your company has supported its customers to commit fraud and/or other crimes (the RICO act makes this more easier to follow up on for law enforcement).
I have never worked on any non-trivial project where not almost all issues were present.
I know this isn't a general rule, but based on my experiences with proprietary projects, even with the best of intentions most became a jenga-esque pile of hacks and shortcuts that few developers would want to show off in public even if the overall system works well.
As a part of a startup that just went under (by "just", I mean literally yesterday) they either can't release the code due to fiduciary responsibility to investors (it could be worth something, particularly if someone decides to dump more money in or the company somehow miraculously recovers) or because of contracts into which they have already entered with investors.
Even if they wanted to open source or just share the source, there could be some real effort involved in reviewing the code to ensure that nothing sensitive will be exposed.
Re the other comment about owning copyright on everything (eg. Due to components being licensed from other vendors), they could rip that out. Thinking about this triggered a memory of when Descent 1 source was published, they excluded the sound library for this reason. Could be tough to excise something more integral though I guess.
Can you legally do this? Not sure how the legal terms around assets are normally structured...
If the code is your sole asset, wouldn't investors get access to it? This is kind of like lighting your office chairs on fire vs returning them to investors.
I wish I knew about this, I've been learning the python data analysis ecosystem recently and this would be an excellent resource. Maybe visibility is your issue.
In our defence, this post has had more than twice the attention of our Show HN post! I think there's more drama in something like a shutdown and so it's more 'viral'. Getting people to take interest in a new product is much harder.
(Also, HN is not really a good target audience for us, so if you get news from here, it makes sense you'd see this but not the product itself).
With thousands and thousands of startups competing for your attention, it's not that easy!
In many markets, there are several well-funded startups that can afford to spend millions on marketing. That makes it even harder to get visibility as a bootstrapper.
The short answer is we didn't find product / market fit. It made some people happy, and was useful to some people, but it didn't make people go out and tell everyone they know to start using it. ShareLaTeX on the other hand was growing organically and had people singing it's praises even when it would sometimes randomly lose 30 minutes worth of your latest changes... (yes really! That's very fixed now though don't worry). ShareLaTeX just filled a much deeper need for people. There are so many other Python/R options out there that we never filled a deep need with DataJoy.
The exception to that is in teaching. It did fill a big need there, but we never managed to make the business model work (long high touch sales cycles, but universities only willing to pay very low prices per class). We also never found a growth model for this.
Anybody know of any similar alternatives to datajoy? That basically just has an r or python environement online I've been using datajoy, a least a little bit, basically everyday for the past 6 months and I'm sad to see it go.
SageMathCloud (https://cloud.sagemath.com) using a Jupyter notebook with the R kernel, or a Sage worksheet in R mode. (Disclaimer: I work on this.)
SageMathCloud is somewhat similar in functionality to DataJoy + ShareLaTeX, ShareLaTeX is by the same people as DataJoy, and I think ShareLaTeX is not shutting down anytime soon. I had always wondered why they built DataJoy as a separate product, rather than just expanding the functionality of ShareLaTeX. In the case of SageMathCloud, I built something more like DataJoy first, then expanded the functionality to cover LaTeX typesetting, rather than making a separate product. Also, SageMathCloud is 100% open source.
I recently posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12169979 here which was really about having several separate products using similar technology but different names, versus having one big product.
timthelion|9 years ago
jpallen|9 years ago
The main thing that isn't open source with DataJoy is our backend for running code. At the moment this is so tied into Docker, S3, and how we deploy it in our infrastructure, that I don't think it would be much use to anyone else. The innovations here have been in how we deploy and provision it, not in the code itself.
_pmf_|9 years ago
petercooper|9 years ago
cderwin|9 years ago
danjc|9 years ago
Re the other comment about owning copyright on everything (eg. Due to components being licensed from other vendors), they could rip that out. Thinking about this triggered a memory of when Descent 1 source was published, they excluded the sound library for this reason. Could be tough to excise something more integral though I guess.
voltagex_|9 years ago
brianwawok|9 years ago
If the code is your sole asset, wouldn't investors get access to it? This is kind of like lighting your office chairs on fire vs returning them to investors.
mroll|9 years ago
belzebub|9 years ago
williamstein|9 years ago
whatnotests|9 years ago
Perhaps if they spent more time becoming visible and getting people's attention, things would work out.
jpallen|9 years ago
(Also, HN is not really a good target audience for us, so if you get news from here, it makes sense you'd see this but not the product itself).
pavlov|9 years ago
In many markets, there are several well-funded startups that can afford to spend millions on marketing. That makes it even harder to get visibility as a bootstrapper.
specialist|9 years ago
nbmh|9 years ago
jpallen|9 years ago
The exception to that is in teaching. It did fill a big need there, but we never managed to make the business model work (long high touch sales cycles, but universities only willing to pay very low prices per class). We also never found a growth model for this.
zitterbewegung|9 years ago
fauria|9 years ago
svoboda0|9 years ago
williamstein|9 years ago
SageMathCloud is somewhat similar in functionality to DataJoy + ShareLaTeX, ShareLaTeX is by the same people as DataJoy, and I think ShareLaTeX is not shutting down anytime soon. I had always wondered why they built DataJoy as a separate product, rather than just expanding the functionality of ShareLaTeX. In the case of SageMathCloud, I built something more like DataJoy first, then expanded the functionality to cover LaTeX typesetting, rather than making a separate product. Also, SageMathCloud is 100% open source.
I recently posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12169979 here which was really about having several separate products using similar technology but different names, versus having one big product.
willis77|9 years ago
https://www.kaggle.com/kernels https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
smcguinness|9 years ago
verandaguy|9 years ago
This is the first time I've heard of this – had I known a few weeks or months ago, I'd have jumped at the opportunity to learn how to use R.
vegabook|9 years ago
Maybe the clue is in the name!
unknown|9 years ago
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