The site seems to be having intermittent connection issues due to the HN hug-of-death. In the meantime here's their Github repo:<p><a href="https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail</a>
I've been following sourcetrail since the author did his cppcon talk. It does the job well - I remember loading Wolfenstein 3D into sourcetrail and watching the call graph explode from a single point of MAIN into a massive menorah of calls, all winding back to a circular buffer, and finally a single point of FREE. It was beautiful, and it's bittersweet to see the author go the open source route. I had high hopes for their commercial success.<p>Thanks for sourcetrail.
This going open source is just wonderful, but I have a feeling this is going to significantly decrease lower the company's revenue and ultimately hurt the product.<p>So here's my question: how do we avoid that? Outside of freelancers who control their finances directly, most developers probably won't be able to convince their company's money people to pay for something they can get for free. Paying a relatively low annual license can usually be justified for the sake of efficiency, but "donate to the devs to keep the project going" is a much tougher sell.<p>My only idea is selling a "subscription" to signed binary builds under a non-free license, but I'm not sure that would work very well either...
I don't get all the posts saying it's sad that it didn't take off commercially. No obstacle prevents grateful programmers from enriching the creators of a useful tool, and expanding the audience of likely users increases the probability of that happening. It's a great looking product (that I had not been aware of when it was commercial) and deserves wide adoption.
It's sad to see Sourcetrail didn't make it as a commercial product. I really enjoyed it when I tried it out a year or so ago.<p>I appreciate the retrospective on the hurdles you faced. Could you share some learnings for things that did work? I could tell you spent a lot of resources getting the onboarding flow correct (Visual Studio Project Import was nice!), anything related to onboarding-related learnings you can share?
Making tools is a hard business to be in, because the customers are very specialized and few in number.<p>You also tend to compete against free tools (either via licensing or vendor-giveaways)
I bought Sourcetrail a few years ago. It’s been highly useful in diving into large, unfamiliar projects. Thank you! I hope the open model works for you. I know the cost stopped some of my co-workers from buying it.<p>For others, I suggest giving it a try. The only issues I’ve run into is when a project has a build setup that won’t work on your machine. It still works, you just can’t dive as deep.
A similar product is the Woboq Code Browser for C/C++: <a href="https://code.woboq.org/" rel="nofollow">https://code.woboq.org/</a><p>It's with open source but not free software: <a href="https://github.com/woboq/woboq_codebrowser/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/woboq/woboq_codebrowser/</a>
I wonder if selling integrations with language server[1] implementations would be a way to multiply the customer base enough to make this viable as a business.<p>[1]: <a href="https://langserver.org" rel="nofollow">https://langserver.org</a>
Came here to say I paid for this a couple of years ago and found it very useful (ended up using it on both C++ and Java codebases), do give it a try.<p>Sad to see that it didn't make it as a commercial product (wonder what lesson to draw from this ...)
I indexed a few samples. It looks pretty good. Can't use it for work, but definitely makes it really fun to look at source code. Java is 3GL. Python is 4GL.