[moot]

I found myself in the same exact position with Canvas/DrawQuest earlier this year. Everyone (including myself) was laid off a few months ago, but we'd hoped to keep the app running with the remaining revenue/cash-on-hand and volunteered time (cut short by a recent hack).

It sucks, but I think we'll see more of it in the coming months/year. A lot of the seed-funded apps/companies from the past few years simply won't represent later-stage venture opportunities, and may find themselves in a position where they can't raise additional capital but can keep the service afloat without the payroll overhead.

[diggan]

Kind of off topic but what keeps you from open sourcing it and hosting with some provider that loves be showed in the light of open source?

[criley2]

When people say "why not open source it", I begin to question something:

- Are you saying, "why not pay yourself to spend many hours working your codebase into something that can be, at a minimum, copied down and installed successfully on hardware that you don't control" that doesn't violate any IP and only includes code you are legally permitted to open source

- Or are you saying: "Just open up the repo as-is and see what happens!"

It seems the latter option (just dump everything) is the only feasible option for a business who cannot afford additional development, but is probably immoral and illegal (you likely don't have all the rights to ALL of the code).

The first option sounds great but if moot doesn't have money in the business to pay himself to do all of that work... are you suggesting he just volunteer a large amount of his personal time to do a bunch of free work for a failing business? I can understand why a developer would prefer to get paid for their effort (and the type of developer who wishes to work for free, by default, wouldn't be in this position and would have open sourced the project from the get go...)

[andreasklinger]

We were in a similar situation and considered it.

There is quite a trail of minor problems:

Eg.

Legal implications with investors/shareholders/etc

(Unlikely but) Potential security issues

Fixing the code to a level that other people can run it

Documenting the code to a level that other people understand how to run it (eg dependencies on services around it)

And i am pretty sure there are many more.

All solvable problems but in most cases come in a moment when a founder has already ran too far and is out of cash/time/energy to tackle those.