Typically when a reporter or even customer asks you what happens if you go out of business, your gut reaction is to get a little bit defensive. That said, our current economy is, in some ways, suffering because a lot of dreamers didn’t prepare for the possibility of failure. When we started thinking about our company from a customer’s standpoint, we agreed that something needed to be done to ensure Pogoplug would be useful with or without our support. Our goal is to take responsibility – in advance- for our product and our consumers in the unlikely event that we don’t succeed.
So, to all of those people that asked (and even those who wondered but didn’t voice it), “What happens if Pogoplug goes out of business?” we now have an answer: we empower the community and our customers to be self-sufficient. We have created an Escrow Account that holds the source code for Pogoplug’s back-end services. In the unlikely event of our bankruptcy, our source code will be published on SourceForge for the community to manage how they see fit.
This means other programmers, companies, or organizations can have complete access to rebuild and maintain the necessary servers to keep Pogoplugs working. Our community has been insightful enough to ask these imperative questions and challenge us to think outside of our paradigm, so we know that our community is the most responsible benefactor.
We are big fans of supporting the open source community, and feel this move is good for the community *and* our customers. We’ve seen user communities grow healthy and independent through their passionate user communities and we know that our most prized possession will be in great hands if anything should happen to our beloved company.
[...] made this announcement through a post on their blog, which you can read here. A few members of the press and blogger community have picked up the story. Here’s what [...]
I like your plans a great deal! Thank you for answering this question that no doubt many customers have.
Best always,
Dave
What license will you use? Will it be GPLv3 compatible?
So you’ll put all of the code up, the iPhone client, PC/Mac/Linux clients, and web-backend source, along with source of the PogoPlug…up? That’s a badass guarantee.
Isn’t this just basically asking people to buy your boxes, stop paying for the service to wait until you go under and then take benefit of the hardware? Wouldn’t it be a much better idea to pump out as many of these units as possible and get people to use it to it’s full potential rightaway? I mean I for one always wanted to buy one of these plug-in servers but with this kind of model it surely won’t be from you. Give me the sources now, create a binary module blob for your proprietary services and let us run free with the rest of it. If you can make people aware of your solution you will gain customers and make money. Right now I can’t see what the use of this guarantee model is. Basically you’re challenging your potential customers to find a competitor that sells the hardware without a binary restriction and as far as I’m aware there are several alternatives. I can buy one of these dubbed Sheevaplugs from the manufacturer for the same money you are charging me and do whatever I want.
This is great to hear; I had blogged about this model of software development for startups that provide insurance to their customers —
http://www.amitshah.net/2009/02/startups-in-14-sentences.html
I’ve blogged about this piece of news as well where I mention a couple of benefits of going open right away — it’s not going to hurt you to make the switch today:
http://www.amitshah.net/2009/05/we-open-if-we-die.html
Another important question might be “what happens if Pogoplug succeeds?”.
I would hate to sit here and hope that you fail, I think the product looks good but I am uneasy with the idea that I can’t see the code especially since it must in some way be able to peek at my data. So would pogoplug be willing to consider some terms under which the code would be released, say if you have 10.000 customers staying with you for a minimum of a year.
That way we show you that we trust you to harbour the project and devise new ideas, after which we might be able to help you realise some of them at the small cost of freeing the source code. Sure some people might install their own server and bypass you all together but I would wager that most people would not.
LOL, you’re kidding right? you believe so strongly in FOSS that you’ll use it only when your company fails? Dear ones, that is so not the point.
I think you misunderstood. I would love to use this, I would also love that it is Open Source. I think it is a great promise they have made to their customers. I just wish the options for getting to see the source extended beyond the rather sad option of “cheering for defeat” since I think they have a good product.
I plan to buy one, it is exactly the kind of thing I have been looking for. I hope Pogoplug has great success and I hope they will reward us for putting our trust in them. That is all that was intended.
[...] reading this piece of news this morning via phoronix about a company called pogoplug has me really excited. I’d feel [...]
I think your company is being very generous and more than reasonable. I also wondered how you could continue offering services for free. I guess the point is that if or when you CAN’T, that’s a good time to go with open source. Others will help innovate and expand the concept thereby keeping the device relevant and useful.
But I hope you make a boat-load of money and stay in business for many, many years!
And my HUGE thanks in advance for all the future cool innovations you offer.
I am buying mine at the end of this week.
I asked this question of course because I didn’t want to be stuck with a useless device. I have plenty of those. I’ve read many of the responses and conclude that we must have faith in this company that it will succeed and remain solvent. Isn’t this what America was built on?
As a fellow entrepreneur, I understand the need for positivity and risk(adversion as well,
I’m relatively certain they don’t release the code because they want to host the servers for future revenue plans.
Of course this will have to turn into a subscription model sooner or later.
They can really only sell so many devices for so long. e.g. Tivo.
I’m an optimist and hope you succeed and feel confident you’ll be trustworthy with my information. That said, I wish you the best of luck and plan to purchase your device. Thanks for the frank statements.