Resonate formally dissolving

General
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From their website:

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@simon

“Resonate formally dissolving”

That’s a shame, but not unexpected. It’s been a zombie project for a while now. I understand some of the people who have been involved in Resonate are now active in some of the newer projects?

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@strypey Yeah, I wrote some of the code for Resonate but it stopped being functional before much of it could see the light of day, and we took a bunch of it with us to Mirlo.

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Another great example of the importance of software freedom. Well … I presume the code written for Resonate was under a free license? Or was it just that you retained copyright rather than your work agreement with Resonate making it ‘work for hire’, with the copyright belonging to them?

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Yeah! It’s the value of free software!

Resonate’s code was all GPL iirc, but they hadn’t actually made it all publicly available. The code that I wrote (which was primarily a streaming player beam) and chunks of that turned into the front-end for Mirlo. Additionally Resonate was running on kind of two, (or three? don’t remember) APIs that all did a variety of separate tasks. A chunk of that was this but it certainly wasn’t the whole picture, and parts of the rest of the code never made it public and I don’t know what role they did (some of it was authentication, some of it was processing audio).

Along a similar line Ampled made the determination to make their software open source, but they didn’t do so from the start, and making it open source ready became a large lift that happened way too late in the project. I think it was more of an opportunistic “we need help working on this” that came a little too late for it to be helpful.

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This is a common pattern. I saw it with a kiwi company called BuckyBox (an early Enspiral startup). They started publishing their code in 2014, and within a couple of years they seem to have collapsed. Although no official shutdown announcement or postmortem was every published AFAIK.

I think the lesson is, publish all the code from day 0, like Loomio (another Enspiral startup that’s still going strong). That way the code is written to be read by strangers from day 0. Which means it tends to be more thoughtfully architected, thoroughly commented, and independently tested. Also, an engaged community is built around it long before things get tough, and with luck, that might provide enough of a boost to get through the hard times.

That’s a real shame. So much reinventing of the wheel could have been avoided if the whole Resonate crew had learned the lesson above before the project started.