VistaDB shutting down because of business operating costs

&#62; <i>Option – Open Source the Product</i><p>&#62; <i>No, Not really an option at all. Who would work on it? Sure lots of people love to consume open source projects, but very few people contribute to them. And I have put a LOT of money into this product, I am not going to just give it away until I can at least break even. I have to put my kids through college, hopefully reclaim part of the money I have put into the company, etc. And lets face it donation type projects never, ever make money. Advertising on the site, etc are all pointless wastes of time.</i><p>Um, how is this not an option when terminating the project is? I'm not saying that he should open source anything, but this justification is silly, especially when compared to his previous explicit option of killing and burying the project.

Every time I see a vendor abandon a product without open sourcing it it becomes that much less likely I'll touch a non-open source product. Got burned that way with Joel S. (CityDesk), not going to happen again if I can help it.

I think Jason killed his company himself. He went and moved into a new office and hired a bunch of people. If you don't have the money for that, then don't do it. I believe that if he stayed lean he'd be able to survive.<p>I am an owner of a VistaDB license and I truly love it, but I am not about to pay $699 for a version that has no activation. I bought the product and if he is going to go out of business and shut down the activation servers, the product I bought will be useless. Garbage! If he is going under, we should be able to get that last release without activation for free. Ridiculous. Jason definitely isn't handling this appropriately. I never liked his paranoid licensing to begin with.

I had never really heard of these guys before. But, I'm a huge fan of .Net and wish they could keep going. Open sourcing it would be great but I know I would have a hard time letting it go. I wonder if this thing could have worked in Azure as an in memory DB. You could use it as an interesting type of mem cache.