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I am a cofounder at a small startup (http://devver.net) that will be shutting down soon.

We hate to see our work completely disappear. We are currently looking for a company to purchase our code but we're also considering open-sourcing parts of our code base.

We have investors and we're aware that "giving away" the code they paid to develop will not be very enticing, but if we spend our own time to do the prep work (and if we can show that the process is low-risk), they may prefer that to the code simply disappearing.

Does anyone have experience open-sourcing a previously closed-source code base, especially in a startup? Any advice, considerations, success/horror stories, or ideas would be appreciated.

http://devver.net

Sorry that the service isn't actually available to play around with yet (it's in private beta). If you sign up for our beta list, we'll work to get you an invite as soon as we can.

That aside, what do you think of the idea and site? What isn't clear? What questions do we need to answer?

Thanks in advance for your help! Ben

My cofounder and I have long agreed that most big company IP agreements suck (we've written about it at http://devver.net/blog/2008/08/looking-for-your-first-cs-job-be-sure-to-own-your-ideas/). Many of them state that employee IP, no matter when it's created, is owned by the company (whether or not that's enforceable is another state-specific question).

Now we're hiring (http://devver.net/jobs) and are trying to figure out a reasonable agreement for the IP employees generate in their free time.

On the one hand, we want to encourage our employees to work on what they want outside of work. They'll be happier, they'll increase their breadth of knowledge, and we want to support open source.

On the other hand, we do want to make sure we own the IP that directly relates our business (no matter when it's created). And since we want to hire full-time employees who are free to work from home, there won't always be a clear distinction between "company time" and "personal time."

Have any of you founders come up with an agreement that both encourages outside work yet protects your company adequately (and doesn't completely freak out investors)? I'd love to what different companies are doing in this regard.

I'm wondering whether or not a professional security audit would be a good investment. While we're working hard to build a very secure system, I think an outside perspective could help us identify threats we hadn't considered.