Ask HN: Startup shutting down, should we open source?
7 amadeoeoeo 18 6/27/2025, 4:23:26 PM
After 5 years of building and fighting for our startup, we’ve reached the end — the product will be shut down soon. I won’t mention names to keep this from sounding promotional. Let’s just say it’s a kind of website builder.
We’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to sell the codebase. Meanwhile, some of our most loyal users are now asking us to open source it. Part of me feels this would be a meaningful way to give back and ensure the project doesn’t completely disappear.
However, I can also foresee a lot of technical and legal complications, not to mention potential maintenance burdens.
Has anyone here been through this before? Any lessons, regrets, or advice?
Thanks a lot in advance!
(AI used to improve spelling)
Shouldn't have a maintenance burden. That burden will be extinguished with the corporation.
If I were you, I'd put it on github with a corporate account, leave a readme that it's abandoned and then mark the repo read-only.
Let (interested) customers know and encourage them to fork it. Disable issues and pull requests before you publish.
Alternatively, put a source dump on your website, and let people know they can put it on Github, but you're not doing it. If nobody republishes it before the corporate site goes down, it is what it is.
Because “startup” is often used in a weak sense only to mean “new business,” there may not be corporate protections for the beneficial owners of this startup.
If it is a Silicon Valley style startup, then the founders probably ought to talk to their investors because that relationship matters and the investors probably know something about open sourcing code bases from shut downs.
Because you don't want to become a maintainer. Just make it clear that it is provided as-is, without support.
It does after all represent a lot of value having been poured into it, worthy of a better ending than rm -rf, even if it didn't reach break-even.
> Legal complications
If your code was written by you and you are not infringing on any patents and you don't have any client data in your repos, you should be fine I guess, but I am not a lawyer.
Just make it MIT and open it to the public. Make sure there are no keys or credentials in the repos either.
It will be also easier for other people to find them and report or fix them.
In general it's a bad plan to rely on code secrecy for security. It's security through obscurity which never works out. All the cryptography schemes and algorithms are public. Most of the public internet runs on open source code. Transparency is a strength, not a weakness.
If you really want to put an open source project out in the world the right way, taking what you learned and building an appropriate code base might be a better route.
And if you don’t really want to put an open source project out in the world, that’s okay.
Your customers had an interest in paying you enough to stay in business. They did not pay enough (and maybe because you did not charge enough).
And to me, it seems like you are probably ready to move on and now is probably a good time for moving on. Good luck.
EDIT: to clarify as I realize that was pretty vague.
1) Depending on how you use your dependencies you may have a licensing conflict that makes the GPL incompatible.
2) I think your shareholders/VCs/whoever holds the equity (or if you're bankrupt the senior bondholders) probably own the copyright for the code so you would need their permission.