[nickpsecurity]

Yeah, that's pretty impressive. YC should consider making it a requirement of funding that the components go open-source if they shutdown without acquisition, etc. Aside from collective benefit, a future, YC startup might get a head start from their docs or components. They seem to fund multiple startups in the same market segments at times.

[TylerE]

That would likely be overly onerous...what if they use licensed 3rd party components?

[hkmurakami]

And in such a case, an Open Source mandate would directly conflict with the financial interests of the investors (the time required for the effort takes away from the liquidation amount of the remaining assets.

[nickpsecurity]

It would only if the software source or patents compromised the value they gained from the business. This would be the case for some startups. It wouldn't be for others where brand, talent, & existing users were what they were after.

It also wouldn't take any significant time given developers could just push the final source and docs into a Github repo with a license. Or just dump it as a zip on the web. That's nothing. Also a good chance that at least one ex-developer would like to do it just so their work wasn't totally wasted.

[jsmeaton]

How many production systems have you come across that could be dumped onto the public without any cleaning? Credentials, build systems, personal information, patent use, are a couple of examples that I've seen in prod code that couldn't or shouldn't be included.

Assuming the cost of open sourcing something is zero, even if it's just a zip dump, is usually not correct.

[nickpsecurity]

Fair enough. I forgot about the malpractice of putting credentials and personal information in the code itself. Companies doing that would have a hard time open sourcing the code. Others whose build system doesnt cleanly separate 3rd party or internal stuff might also have trouble. Patents I already handled by saying they simply don't release third party stuff that's proprietary. Patent-encumbered code or tech is one such thing.

So, yeah, I'll take those corrections.

[nickpsecurity]

They'd have to be left out. The rest could be open-sourced. If 3rd party stuff is hidden behind API, it could even be replaced with open-source stuff. That's not even necessary as my recommendation is to not overly burden the startups with this requirement. They just dump what's theirs somewhere under FOSS license. Others can do the necessary work of dealing with missing, 3rd-party components if they want to reuse the FOSS code.

[digital_ins]

But Parse was acquired by Facebook. So this clause wouldn't apply.