Project killing, code throwing (over the wall) and cost, oh my!

I got some requests to make RavenMQ an OSS project. And I thought that I might explain the thinking behind why I don’t want to do that.

Put simply, I have never thrown a significant amount of code over the wall for other people to deal with. Oh, I have done it with a lot of small projects ( < ~2,000 LOC ) which I assume that most people can figure out in an hour or less, but a significant, non trivial amount of software? Never done that.

It doesn’t feel right. More than that, it isn’t likely to actually work. Even mature, multiple contributors projects have a hard time to do a leader shift, if they were structured as a single person effort. To do so on a brand new codebase which no one really knows? That is a recipe for either tying me up with support or creating a bad impression if someone doesn’t get the code to work.  One of the things that I learned from many years of working with Open Source software is that the maturity level of the project counts, and that just throwing code over the wall is a pretty bad way of ensuring that a project will survive and thrive.

And then there is another issue, I don’t believe that RavenMQ is as valuable now that SignalR is out there. You can do pretty much whatever you could do with RavenMQ with SignalR, and that means that as far as everyone is concern, this is a pure win. There isn’t a need to create a separate project simply to have a separate project.