Publish source code for http://astrid.com/

[TylerRick]

So that those who wish to continue to use the sharing/syncing features of Astrid after astrid.com shuts down on August 5 (yesterday?) can quickly set up their own Astrid servers..

[dolanor]

👍

[shuhikari]

I think that Yahoo will create another tool with this code. But is just a hunch

[dolanor]

I'm not sure.
If it was the case, why wouldn't they direct us to the new service created by Yahoo ?
It would make sense.

[dolanor]

(They bought zimbra, but they didn't created something out of it. Maybe they included some parts in their own webmail, but not so much I guess. I think they bought the company to get the people, not the technology)

[shuhikari]

Both ways it doesn't make sense.

Astrid was a great service with many users around the world, so why to shutdown it?

I migrated for Wunderlist, but miss some features present in Astrid.

This is somehow strange... what is the point?

[dolanor]

Maybe it wasn't that profitable ? (Not enough paying users to pay the infrastructure ?)

[shuhikari]

But yahoo made every free user [profit with ads] turn into premium members for free. 😕

[TylerRick]

It doesn't make any sense to me either. As soon as I saw the announcement that it was shutting down, I searched everywhere to try to find out their reason, but I haven't found anywhere that explains _why_ Yahoo decided to shut down this service.

Astrid had all these claims on their website that it was the best — "20 best browser apps of the year", "Most popular to-do list manager: Astrid", "The best list maker and task manager there is for Android phones." — claims that I mostly believed even. They had a huge, probably somewhat loyal user base.

So why on earth would they just throw all that away and actually tell everyone to "please go away" and "use one of our competitors' products instead"?? It just doesn't make any sense!

And even if it does make some sense from a business perspective, does alienating and turning away some 10,000 users (? — I would use the number of installs from Google Play but it looks like they removed it from Google Play already) really seem like a good idea to you??

If the infrastructure costs were too high, then open-source the infrastructure code and let willing volunteers host the infrastructure — or convert it to a peer-to-peer model, which would make me feel more comfortable anyway than to have all my private data on their centralized server...

Even if Astrid itself wasn't being profitable, they could have at least tried to keep their user base around and profited from advertising or integration with other Yahoo services. Even the intangible benefits of having a wildly popular app with your name and branding on it seems like it should have been reason enough to keep it around!

[TylerRick]

But since all that obviously wasn't enough for them, if they're going to abandon a project, why not at least make it easy for other people to take over the project and continue to maintain it?

One of the main criteria I used when choosing a to-do list app in the first place was that it must be open-source, so that I would always have the freedom to change it to be how I wanted it (if they were to take the official version in a direction I didn't like, for example, or if it was missing a feature that I really wanted but no one else was willing to add), or continue development if they decided to no longer maintain it themselves.

But I guess I've just learned another lesson: that an open-source client is not enough for a client/server app. I should have also checked to make sure that the server side of the software was also open source. The server software must also be open-source if we want to be safe from apparent corporate selfish lameness like what Yahoo just did.

I'm pleased to see that Alex Baker has forked the client code and published it to Google Play and that it can sync with Google Tasks. But especially after seeing how even Google has closed down some of my favorite services (like Google Reader), that doesn't give me much consolation (will Google Tasks be shut down next?). Plus Alex's version says "No sharing or assigning tasks", which was one of the main features I depended on. So I still hope someone will come up with an open-source replacement for Astrid.com that the client app can sync with...

[mcr]

So, I had given up on Astrid because of the very poor sync with Google Tasks. Much of that seemed to be because they wanted to push me towards astrid.com, but it never worked well enough for me. I didn't know about Baker's program.
I think that if the decision came after Yahoo bought, then I think it's just more Yahoo poor management.

[stikhomirov]

Guys, is there any chance the source code fro astrid.com to be published?
It would be great to find the way to contact the team directly and get their comments on the subject.