Ask HN: Did Plivo silently abandon open sourcing their software?

31 points by b-lee 4 years ago | 3 comments

Their launch tagline was "Open source alternative to Twilio". I just took a look at their repository(https://github.com/plivo/plivoframework) and it looks like it hasn't been updated since 2015 and the documentation has been down for long time(https://groups.google.com/g/plivo-users/c/ZuImvGKhnno/m/Uj-109PQCQAJ). I couldn't find any announcement that they have become closed source. I think I might have missed a conversation/announcement regarding this.

thebeardisred 4 years ago |

Some clarification on what you mean would be great.

When I look at their organization on Github I see quite a few active projects e.g. "Sharq" - SHARQ Server is an flexible, rate limited queuing system based on the SHARQ Core library and Redis. (https://github.com/plivo/sharq-server) as well as client packages in quite a few languages.

Beyond that the documentation you referenced clearly points out that FreeSwitch (https://github.com/signalwire/freeswitch) is the telephony engine (https://web.archive.org/web/20130314113846/http://docs.plivo...) and the install script from the docs shows that their roots are in Pilvo being a Python web app (https://github.com/plivo/plivoframework/blob/master/scripts/...). I also see a few Django applications in their repositories as well.

Thus, they open sourced their software. Are they open sourcing all of their software? Likely not. It could be that they open sourced much of their code and then got no contributions.

If they weren't receiving any contributions in alignment with their development, there would be no value for them to continue to have that distraction from running their business. It could also be that they didn't have the resources to _maintain_ external facing repositories, issues, and the communities around them.

Providing a more clear explanation of your expectations would help get you the best answer.

woojoo666 4 years ago | |

Considering their github repo (the outdated one) still says "open-source" while their website does not, I'd expect some official statement on the move and the reasons why. I think it's the bare minimum of transparency, especially for early users who started using it because it was open source

b-lee 4 years ago | |

Your point of view makes sense but removing the documentation how to build and deploy the parts of the code they open sourced before shows an intent that they don't want people using it. They could just announce they are no longer open source and put the docs on Readme and move on. But putting the docs down silently is breaking the promise that was the tagline of their product.