Ask HN: What do people do with the code from failed startups?

I typically tar it up and store it somewhere safe. On occasion, I'll work on a new project that could use a piece of code I know I've got stored away. Other times, it's something I stumble upon years later and laugh at myself for my coding style & quality, which continues to improve. "Omg I can't believe I tried to solve X that way... wow..."

I've seen a few people open source their code for failed projects. Hadn't really thought about that, but it's something I'll keep in mind should I have an interesting, failed project.

My company EventVue failed. We tried to sell the code, but didn't get any serious offers. We'd raised 500k in funding so any money we gained from a sale would have gone straight to repaying our investors. I would have loved to have been able to do that just for the long-term goodwill, but financially I didn't have any incentive to work on finding a buyer. The chances of us selling for greater than 500k after the team left quickly approached zero. Good startup founders are usually quickly picked up by other companies or launch into another gig of their own. For me, it was a hard decision to pull the plug on EventVue, but once I did, I wanted to move on as quickly as possible. Wrapping up the last pieces of EventVue was painful enough.

The code still lives on my laptop and I reference pieces from time to time. I would have open-sourced it, but it included a lot of expectations about how the infrastructure was set up and would have taken a ton of time to generalize or properly document. The demand obviously wasn't there or else we wouldn't have gone out of business.

So there she lies. ~100,000 lines of code and 3 years of my life. May she RIP.

If the startup isn't costing you a lot it may be best it leave it running. It'll give you more credibility as if someone says "I Made X and failed" yet there's just an expired domain at X you've basically scrubbed out the past and your work.

There's other sides to this as you won't want an ugly broken site up connected to your name. Case by case basis really.

There isn't a whole lot you could do with the code, i'd just say for most open source it and leave it quietly running, if feasible.

I've attempted to make my code as OO possible. This means I can actually reuse it later on other projects. Authentication, ORM, etc.

Everyone should release configurations at least. You can easily release those and those who say you can't either have really bad configuration or too lazy.

Yeah, the Justin.TV guys did for $250k on Ebay.

It is donated to starving orphans.

I got permission to open source the first startup I worked for: http://andrewbadr.com/log/8/flowgramcom-open-source-release/

It would be a pleasant surprise if anyone got it running.

Open sourcing is always a good option.

Etherpad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherPad) got sold to Google and the code was subsequently open sourced. It's since launched a number of hosting sites providing collaborative editing services. The source code lives on, there's even a node.js port available with a much smaller footprint (see Etherpad Lite (https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite).

Another good example is Mozilla. When Netscape crashed and burned Mozilla somehow managed to come out of the ashes.

Kind of depends on what code you're talking about. Some "failed" startups may have valuable code that can be sold or licensed out, even if it ends being somewhat of a firesale. Others may tuck it away on a backup or project folder and never revisit it or only pluck away some useful bits here or there. Others may use it as a template for a completely different business just to "get an app up and running" if what they had prior had some similar pieces.

Finally, some may decide to open source some or all of the code. As was mentioned, it's hard for others to use it, though, since it is rarely the case that a startup's codebase is going to be pretty and easy to get going and using, versus some nicely structure, re-usable OSS library.

A few of my old colleagues bought the code from our bankrupt employer and made a second attempt at creating a business with it. They did better than the original owners, but not much.

In all other cases I've come into contact with the code just dies. Open sourcing would be nice, but that's obviously not a priority in a bankrupcy.

One of the big advantages of deploying on Google App Engine is that it just keeps running by itself, and usually for pretty cheap. Just let it run as a living portfolio.

Make sure you learned from it while you were writing it. Then it never completely goes away.