The main thing that isn't open source with DataJoy is our backend for running code. At the moment this is so tied into Docker, S3, and how we deploy it in our infrastructure, that I don't think it would be much use to anyone else. The innovations here have been in how we deploy and provision it, not in the code itself.
- It may contain configuration information.
- It may contain private keys or passwords.
- It may contain customer specific code (if you maintain customer specific features either via feature toggles or branches), which may leak information of your paying customers.
- It may have unintended copyright violations.
- It may contain software that is licensed in a way that makes it a copyright violation to distribute your software outside or your company (publishing it is distributing it). This may also apply if you distribute your sources without any (source or binary) parts of the proprietary dependency.
- It may fall under the export restrictions for cryptographic software (these have been mainly dropped, but not completely).
- It may directly or indirectly make your patent violations public (oh, you have them already, but nobody knows about them).
- It's of embarrassing quality.
- It may make it public that your company has defrauded its customers / and or users.
- It may make it public that your company has supported its customers to commit fraud and/or other crimes (the RICO act makes this more easier to follow up on for law enforcement).
Not just that they don't want to "show off", but even more that they don't think it will be useful.
It takes a non zero amount of work to document a project such that it can be used and extended by someone who didn't write it.
Re the other comment about owning copyright on everything (eg. Due to components being licensed from other vendors), they could rip that out. Thinking about this triggered a memory of when Descent 1 source was published, they excluded the sound library for this reason. Could be tough to excise something more integral though I guess.
If the code is your sole asset, wouldn't investors get access to it? This is kind of like lighting your office chairs on fire vs returning them to investors.
Someone also owns the code, I guess, and they might want to use it for something else at some point.
Some products might have been hack-jobs form the beginning that ballooned, they might work but they could be total hack jobs that would either A) be worthless on their own or B) slightly embarrassing to show.
I've not been in the situation from a company perspective, but I have taken a product I've made off from the shelves and the factors above came into play. I am sure there are more as well.
Perhaps if they spent more time becoming visible and getting people's attention, things would work out.
(Also, HN is not really a good target audience for us, so if you get news from here, it makes sense you'd see this but not the product itself).
In many markets, there are several well-funded startups that can afford to spend millions on marketing. That makes it even harder to get visibility as a bootstrapper.
The exception to that is in teaching. It did fill a big need there, but we never managed to make the business model work (long high touch sales cycles, but universities only willing to pay very low prices per class). We also never found a growth model for this.
SageMathCloud is somewhat similar in functionality to DataJoy + ShareLaTeX, ShareLaTeX is by the same people as DataJoy, and I think ShareLaTeX is not shutting down anytime soon. I had always wondered why they built DataJoy as a separate product, rather than just expanding the functionality of ShareLaTeX. In the case of SageMathCloud, I built something more like DataJoy first, then expanded the functionality to cover LaTeX typesetting, rather than making a separate product. Also, SageMathCloud is 100% open source.
I recently posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12169979 here which was really about having several separate products using similar technology but different names, versus having one big product.
https://www.kaggle.com/kernels https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
This is the first time I've heard of this – had I known a few weeks or months ago, I'd have jumped at the opportunity to learn how to use R.
Maybe the clue is in the name!