[xwdv]

> * Since my co-founder will still work within the same market, I can't open-source the code without causing friction I'd say. So might not do that.

You were not paid to keep this code under wraps. You don’t owe anybody any favors. If they didn’t want you open sourcing it, they should have valued the code and bought it off of you.

Teach them a lesson. Release the code. Otherwise people will just walk all over you all your life.

[bartread]

> Teach them a lesson. Release the code. Otherwise people will just walk all over you all your life.

That's a very simplistic heuristic for living. Let me ask this: to what end?

In all likelihood, maintaining a good relationship is of greater value than "teaching them a lesson". Most times the only person you can meaningfully teach is yourself.

[xwdv]

It goes both ways. The other founder dropped him and left him with nothing but a useless codebase, he can’t even get any kind of recognition because he’s expected to not release the code he wrote. He’s been fucked.

[fxtentacle]

What would be the benefit for the author from releasing the source code?

Open Source projects can be quite a lot of work to maintain and the demands from people using it for free can be both unfriendly and exhausting.

Plus, a lot of big companies make a lot of money off using free open source projects internally to fuel their closed-source SaaS offerings.

As for releasing it just as a way to exact revenge, I'm not sure that can produce much good. It sounds more like a surefire way to alienate the local startup community. So it could block you out of profitable future business ideas.

[xwdv]

Don’t feel you can’t release an open source project because you don’t want to maintain it. The way it usually works is one person starts a project by making the huge initial effort and releasing it, and then interested maintainers will come out and provide updates where they see fit.

The guy with the open source always has the higher ground. No one loses reputation by giving free code to a larger community.

[fxtentacle]

I did release an open source project, but then eventually I removed my contact info and added a note to ask people to please stop emailing me with their problems, because I was getting way too many requests for help from self-entitled users who thought that i was somehow required to support them in using my free tool.

Another time, I fixed an open source tool to work correctly in the cloud environment that my company was using. They then listed my patched version in their wiki and made it sound like it was an officially supported tool on their platform. The result was that I got flooded with requests from their customers, so I had lots of work helping their customers but I received no cut of the revenue.