Another solid post mortem. This one focuses more on what they did wrong with their financing.

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/05/starting-findory-funding.html

My biggest concern with open sourcing it is twofold.

1. that it would take some energy on our parts to clean it up
2. that without support from the original developers it would be just one of the thousands of abandonware open source projects.

Agreed. That was part of the reason I decided to share. Too many people get all dejected when they fail. Hell I can't say I'm super proud we shut the product down. But people shouldn't fall off the planet either and I really want to get that across.

Looking forward to your post mortem.

" GPL3 gives you the illusion that you're committed to "open source", but actually you're poisoning the pool - ie. commercial users can't use it without giving away their code. So you get the Buzz but at the same time you're not giving away the baby.

Companies that really want to use it still have to pay you.
"

This is not completely true. GPL has two key exceptions - hosted companies (like google, etc) are not considered distribution, nor is use inside companies. So yes, if somebody wants to sell software with your open sourced code, they have to pay you or be GPL themselves.

My guess most of the people wanting to use your code are hosted, so they would no pay you.

All that said, open sourcing your code might still be a good idea, unless you are planning to license and continue to support it.

Hi Paul:

It's very nice to see more and more entrepreneurs share their learning startup experience with the community. Coincidently I was also the co-founder of a location-based service called Kakiloc that we shutdown last November. I've written some thoughts about the similarities between Meetro and Kakiloc here: http://location-based.blogspot.com

Let us know what you are up to next.

Thanks - Martin

I'd suggest following ExtJS route. Releasing BOTH GPL3.0 as well as a commercial license.

Here's the logic:
GPL3 gives you the illusion that you're committed to "open source", but actually you're poisoning the pool - ie. commercial users can't use it without giving away their code. So you get the Buzz but at the same time you're not giving away the baby.

Companies that really want to use it still have to pay you.

Have your cake and eat it too ;)

Open source! There are many of us out there working on location based tech and it would be a huge gain to at least see what was done and learn.

I'm guessing most of you have come here through the Techcrunch post. I really mean it when I say people should share their experiences more. Too much knowledge is lost when companies or products go belly up. Why not save all of us some time. ;)