MORE's source

On the subject of releasing the source of MORE 3.1, per Larry Lessig's piece..

I would actually like to see the source code of MORE released. But I would be very reluctant to ask for it, because it would be ingracious for me to do so, and if you hear me out, I don't know how any of us could ask Symantec to be so generous.

A simplification of what happened..

We built a team and a small company, and a series of outliners for various computers, until we hit on the combination that you like so much (me too). Millions of dollars and huge amounts of time were invested. Lots of risk, ups and downs, bigco attacks, etc. Along comes Symantec, and offers us a huge chunk of stock in return for the product. We sell. The company goes public, my shareholders make a very good return (this includes the devteam for MORE), and the product dies. Symantec, in the end, made a bad investment. But the users actually got a great return on their investment.

For $249 they got to use the fruit of all this work. And even better, the people who developed it got to continue to develop. The team dispersed, creating all kinds of cool MORE-like stuff. Most of it isn't as famous, but some of it is, and all of it is good stuff.

Now to ask Symantec's shareholders, who paid for all this, to pay more, is hard for me to do. Symantec made a bet that the team would stay at the company. But that didn't work out. And without the developers (key point) the source was worthless. A lot of non-engineers don't get this, but that doesn't change it.

Maybe this simplified story will shed some light on the realities of software development. Had we been forced to release the source, I don't think we could have sold our investors on taking a chance on us, or realized the great return we got from the Symantec deal, and gone on to develop more software. The system you describe just wouldn't work, you wouldn't get any of it.

Basically, I would love it if the source for MORE were released. I think it would be a humantarian contribution of the first order, but it's not mine to make.

Postscript: Brad Pettit was the last MORE developer at Symantec to leave.