[jessedhillon]

Let Pa be the probability that some piece of your open-sourced codebase reveals an important technique or strategy to your competitor, thus leveling a technological advantage you have,

Let Ca be the cost of that lost advantage,

Let Cb be the value of good will from the open source community

In what case is Cb bigger than (Pa * Ca)?

[jarek]

When Pa == 0, so like, most of the time.

It's an email app. It talks IMAP^H^H^H^Hto Gmail. It runs on iOS. How many secret, commercially important techniques do you really suppose it contains?

[jessedhillon]

Suppose it writes to Dropbox using internal APIs? How many developer hours should they spend abstracting/obscuring that usage? What are they going to gain by doing that? What are they risking if that process misses something?

[smt88]

There' no such thing as an "internal API", assuming the API works over HTTP.

[jessedhillon]

I don't even understand what this comment is trying to say. If you use HTTP to communicate between services, and those services are not publicly accessible, the use of HTTP makes it no longer a private interface?

For a site which supposedly hosting an audience of entrepreneurs and engineers -- people who understand that the value of a thing can be multi-faceted and not always obvious, or that the difficult of any job is easy to underestimate, and that to convince someone to do something you have to appeal to their incentives/concerns rather than your ideals -- the entire argument in favor of opening this app is built on pedantry and baseless assumptions.

[jarek]

> I don't even understand what this comment is trying to say. If you use HTTP to communicate between services, and those services are not publicly accessible, the use of HTTP makes it no longer a private interface?

Yes - if you make a HTTP call from an app, it can be trivially sniffed. Sniffing HTTP is the first thing a third party trying to discover that undocumented API would do, and you don't need source code for that at all. (This is also why you must always sanitize data coming in from a user's device, even if it's from your own app.)

You can make the argument that there would be a time cost cleaning up the internal calls that will no longer work once the servers are turned off. Sure, but: 1) there are no secrets that would give competitors a new advantage, and 2) if you don't have that time, just chuck the code over the fence and see what happens - worst is that no one uses it, which will be the case with closed code anyway.

[jessedhillon]

The is just so unimaginative that I can't believe you've ever seen the inside of a large operation. How are you going to sniff traffic that's communicating on a private network? And how does trivial sniffability not extend to all unencrypted traffic, ergo nearly everything is public? That's a totally useless definition and misses the point entirely.

Your point #1 is totally unjustified: you don't know what you could learn by e.g. looking at a data structure used internally. #2 shows that you are unable to answer the question of which of Dropbox's incentives are satisfied by doing this.

[smt88]

Someone said consumer apps (Carousel and Mailbox in this case) couldn't be open-sourced because they use "internal" APIs.

My point was just that any API over HTTP that's used by a consumer app is not private or internal. It is a public API with unfriendly documentation.

(Note that when I say "unfriendly documentation," I'm not even talking about sniffing. Most consumer apps can be decompiled by non-experts, and then the text-based API calls would be readable.)

[austenallred]

Undocumented API then?

[chipotle_coyote]

That "formula" really isn't particularly difficult to work around.

First off, if you're open sourcing your codebase because you're getting out of a particular market, you have to ask whether revealing techniques and strategies to competitors in that market is really an issue. After all, if those techniques and strategies had given you a competitive advantage, you probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

Second: If you really are concerned about that, just use the GPL.

[jessedhillon]

The assumption here being that the integration of the now disused product into the parent product (Mailbox into Dropbox) has no potential to reveal the internal workings of the parent product e.g. APIs or data structures. Or that those techniques would only be applicable to competitors in that market. Both are convenient for your argument, but there's no reason to think that they're correct. Moreover, there's no reason for a risk adverse company to accept those assumptions.

My point was to challenge open source cheerleaders to actually give a reason beyond their own gain for why a company should do this. Instead, we have blithe dismissals and narrowly constructed hypotheticals built on optimistic assumptions.

[jarek]

> My point was to challenge open source cheerleaders to actually give a reason beyond their own gain for why a company should do this. Instead, we have blithe dismissals and narrowly constructed hypotheticals built on optimistic assumptions.

I'm sorry, but what? Your whole initial argument is a narrow hypothetical "they will see our secrets" with no theory of what those secrets might actually be - what exactly do you expect in return? I gave you an answer based on your formula, and a follow-up comment afterward. Can you expand what about my answer was built on optimistic assumptions, in a way that your initial theory was not?

There are no private APIs nor secret data structures in software that you've distributed to users. It can all be decompiled and sniffed. "Oh but the competitors will see my code" is basically FUD. How many times has YC told us it's all about the execution, not the technology?

[jessedhillon]

Yeah, the difference is that the "narrow hypothetical" is a concern a real person at any company would have when tasked with deciding whether something should be open sourced. It's appropriately conservative.

You, however, are asking everyone to assume that it's totally safe to reveal any/all source code.

> There are no private APIs nor secret data structures in software that you've distributed to users.

That's fine. What about the code that lives on your servers and supports the client?

[burnte]

When abandoning a market and an app, there is no strategic advantage in that code. This means the solution to that equation is CaCa.