URL Shortening Service Tr.im to Become Open Source Project

August 18, 2009

From OStatic blogs

URL shortening service tr.im languished in relative obscurity among similar services like bit.ly and is.gd, until last week when the company decided to draw attention to itself by claiming it was shutting down. In a petulant blog post, company representatives blamed tr.im’s disintegration on Twitter because the microblogging service "has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future."

Nambu Network, the company behind tr.im, did an abrupt about a face a few days later, claiming Nambu’s bosses had changed their minds and were now ready to sell. Now the drama continues as Nambu reps say they want to release tr.im’s code under an open source license and "renounce all ownership interest in the tr.im domain name and donate it to the community."

As Techcrunch’s MG Siegler points out, the idea sounds good in theory. In practice, however, it ought to make the entire FOSS community dyspeptic. The open source community already has it’s fair share of drama without adding Nambu’s ever-changing and obviously bitter attitude to the mix.

Nambu President, Eric Woodward, says, "It is my personal opinion, after last week, that the usage of URL shorteners needs to transition into the public domain, or the need for them within social networks such as Twitter and Facebook needs to be eliminated. But by so clearly favouring the URL shortener bit.ly, Twitter is able to control this flow of shared link data in a way it would not otherwise be able to. Currently, no one outside of the chosen few can access this data, and that is just not right."

I admire companies that use or switch to open source licensing in order to make a better product. I can’t support businesses, however, that do it as a way to make a point or a quick buck. In this case, Woodward appears to be saying that since Nambu couldn’t get a leg up in a crowded market, they’re picking up their toys and dropping them in a community sandbox instead.

The open source community isn’t a dumping ground for businesses that want to stick it to their competitors. Threatening to cut into your competitor’s market share and playing the "community development will keep people away from ‘bit.ly/twitter and their connected friends’" card is not very becoming. I’m pleased that Woodward thinks the open source community is so powerful that it’s involvement in tr.im’s development has the ability to stunt the growth of similar services, but this is not the right approach to gain support. It seems to me that a project that gets released to the FOSS community with an introduction that uses words like "favoritism" and "misinformation machine" is already a minefield before the first line of code is even reviewed.

How interested are you in getting involved in tr.im’s development? Let’s kick this issue around in the comments.