>Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well.
This might sound mean, but I don't intend it that way: you've already "failed" as a business, so there's no reason to hold yourself to a high standard in the open-source department.
You can totally just drop a code blob on Github and let folks fork it and start organizing to maintain it themselves--it's not like you have anything to lose, and somebody might even find it useful some day.
It's weird to me that people have that hangup about releasing code...if people don't like it, they just won't use it.
Have you done this yourself? I'm curious whether it's something that sounds good in theory until you've been up against the decision yourself, or if it's just a "different strokes for different folks" situation.
It isn't weird to me at all. I would much rather move on with my life than constantly feel bad about the unusable state of a blob of yucky never-designed-to-be-open-source code I just dumped on GitHub.
Almost all the code I write is up on my Github with an appropriate license. Almost all of it nobody really cares about, barring a couple of projects with forks and even some pull requests which I get to as I have time.
The thing is that, for products, abandoned code is strictly better than no code. We see this all the time with games--classic games only get supported once their source is released. The same is true for non-game software.
People who turn up their nose at "yucky" code that works or shipped are not worth considering in the same league as the folks that actually built something. Real artists ship, everything else is just people wanking about best practices.
This might sound mean, but I don't intend it that way: you've already "failed" as a business, so there's no reason to hold yourself to a high standard in the open-source department.
You can totally just drop a code blob on Github and let folks fork it and start organizing to maintain it themselves--it's not like you have anything to lose, and somebody might even find it useful some day.
It's weird to me that people have that hangup about releasing code...if people don't like it, they just won't use it.