But hopefully not before it is too late. We should all think about situations where we are no longer around. Like having your keys/passwords at a notary.
I'm not so sure about that. An actively developed/supported project is often more useful than an abandoned open source one.
Arguably industry is always willing to pay, in aggregate, the cost for free software to be maintained, but is not willing to pay, despite the optimism of those who sell it, for the marginal utility it gives them per-customer (which should be much higher). When asked to do so they will simply support free-as-in-beer or cheaper alternatives until one of those becomes the dominant player. This is why successful and heavily commercialized free software projects often seem to be only just clinging on to profitability (eg Docker).
Are you saying that if you can pay someone to develop their proprietary code for a price you can necessarily find someone to accept the same amount of money for the same work but open sourced? That doesn't seem true. Those are not equivalent offers.
I would assume some people (clearly a minority) would be willing to take a small pay cut when working on FLOSS.
E.G. could someone be paid slightly less at GitLab versus the same role at GitHub, if they believe in GitLab's principles
If there isn't then the original commercial company was obviously never viable either.
Since an entity getting payment for maintenance can neither expect to collect a monopoly rent for the code, nor is required to pay one to anyone else, the cost of maintenance becomes the market price.
Especially when you start talking about a single person company, it could be as simple as the founder being sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it despite making less than they could with other opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the market fails to find someone to run the company.
Maybe Colin should make tarsnap free for bus drivers? ;)
That's not really the problem. The problem is that it lowers the company value: why should I, potential acquirer, shell out $$$ to get your IP, when I can just sit down and wait for it to come down the river?
And there's no guarantee the other acquirers will cooperate. "Why should I wait for the company to collapse and open source it's stuff forcing me to compete with other acquirers when I can buy them now and get a monopoly?"
The source code is part of a startup’s IP. When a startup fails the IP goes to the investors and debtors who can try to recoup some of their investment by selling the IP.
By the time a company fails, the source code isn’t really theirs to give away any more. They have to hand it over to investors. It’s the same reason a failing startup can’t just give away all of their office furniture or other assets.
Even if we ignore that, releasing source code doesn’t actually do anything for most customers of a SaaS platform. They were paying for the service, not the source code. The source code wasn’t designed for individual use, so self-hosting isn’t going to make sense. Maybe some other group would try to run a company around it, but if the first company failed to become sustainable with the source code it’s less likely that a second company would.