Skip to content

Comment on Ask YC: open source your code

Comments

See below a list of OSS from YC companies.

This is clearly not the only way of giving back to the community. What about all the contributions they make to the projects they use. I believe scribd has stretched rails to limits beyond any other site and has made contributions from it. Adam from heroku just discussed a patch he submitted to rails too. The list goes on, I'm sure.

Also, you sound like you have used iPaper, a free service provided by Scribd. Perhaps you should consider an amicable request for an open version of iPaper (since that is obviously why you made this post) rather than calling YC companies parasites. On a related note, I would be interested to hear what parts of your company's product you have opened.

I'll build a list:

http://blog.reddit.com/2008/06/reddit-goes-open-source.html

http://portal.insoshi.com/

http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

http://www.webmin.com/index8.html

http://opensource.heroku.com/

http://trac.youos.com/

http://www.getdropbox.com/install?os=linux

http://www.xobni.com/about/opensource

http://appjet.com/app/150996096/source

On a related note, I would be interested to hear what parts of your company's product you have opened.

Funny you asked. I happened to work for a startup that got acquired by a big&evil corporation that specifically prohibited our engineers not only from opening our code, but even from contributing to existing OSS projects, which, partially sparkled my original post.

BTW, there is only one item on your list that qualifies as a valid answer to my question (for obvious reasons) and that is webmin.com, which is by far my favorite YC startup.

Look again. I kept adding.

Ok fine. :-)

Credit to jwilliams for starting the list.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.