joshu on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/joshu/status/15492062459731968" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/joshu/status/15492062459731968</a><p>"@cdixon open sourcing it would be an enormous pain in the ass. selling it not as bad but yahoo infrastructure and auth problematic."<p>Besides that, open sourcing delicious wouldn't solve the problem - someone still has to host it, and maintain it, and import several million people's bookmark collections in to it. That takes significant time and money. Having the code is just a small part of it.<p>A smarter thing to do would be to campaign for the (public) data to be released as a huge data dump, ready for people to run their own analysis on (an Amazon Public Data Set for example). This too has plenty of problems though - under what terms should that data be licensed? People's bookmarks belong to them - would they be happy with their contributions being released as part of a massive data set for anyone (including sploggers) to do anything they liked with it?
Why bother with the code? The value is with the existing links database, and since it belongs to the users, Yahoo shouldn't have the right to sell or distribute it freely.<p>Since users can already import/export their bookmarks, the only support Yahoo needs to provide is keeping the import API open for a little longer after the site is shut down. Of course this assumes that users would want to migrate their data to a replacement service.
Google has open sourced: Jaiku, Etherpad, Wave among other things, before closing them down.<p>Open sourcing it wouldn't solve the discovery/hosting part, but I still think they should do it.<p>I'm sure it wouldn't be "easy," but it wouldn't be unprecedented.<p>Yahoo! folks also should take a look at dataliberation.org, for best practices on getting on data out (also a Google joint).<p>(Nope, I don't work for Google :D, just think they've done some good things in this space. )
The actual code doesn't matter.<p>It's the tens of thousands of man hours that have been spent creating one of the best indexes with careful tags for millions of pages. The data's what makes Delicious matter.<p>And, if you open-source the data, I see people crying foul over privacy.
I'm pessimistic: it takes vastly more work to keep it alive, via either OSS or selling, than to kill it. Nobody who Yahoo cares about will notice any news related to Delicious, for fair or foul.
Since Yahoo! probably wants to avoid the embarrassment of seeing Delicious flourish under different management, they're unlikely to change course here.<p>But having >1,000,000 people with freshly tagged and exported links in a standard format seems to provide an opportunity to those who think they can do better.<p>One request for whoever that is: can you add the 'sort my links by popularity' feature that Yahoo! never developed?
This is not a copy of delicious, but I wrote this yesterday in a hurry. <a href="http://selficious.appspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://selficious.appspot.com</a> - It imported my bookmarks and I use it to manage them and my future ones (add, edit, delete). The code will of course be opensource. I just need to clean it a lil' bit :)
For ppl who haven't exported their bookmarks yet, I wrote a quick webapp to help (for the command line skittish)<p><a href="http://mattcrampton.com/delicious" rel="nofollow">http://mattcrampton.com/delicious</a>
There is an open source clone of Delicious, Scuttle: <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/</a>
I doubt we'll see it open sourced, or saved in any form by Yahoo. It's too much cost/effort for them, when that's the reason they're scrapping it in the first place.<p>What i'd like to see is people quickly rolling out tools that help us get our Delicious bookmarks into other sites easier. Eg into Google Bookmarks. That currently requires you to install the Google Toolbar and import them through that (ugh).
Couldn't we do a service where delicious users can export all their bookmarks (bar private ones if they want) and then send them onto a aggregator so a new service can pick up where delicious left. I am assuming here that technically delicious is not (very) challenging, its the data that is precious.
Why not try the Xmarks method? Seeing as a fair number of people are paying for pinboard as a replacement, Yahoo could ask people to commit to paying $10 (outright or per year) to keep their delicious account.
Is there anything particularly special about the code which would make it interesting? The value seems to be in the concept, and then the content produced by the large user base.