The start-up code of conduct and ethics

No offense, early adopters, but if you desire a SLA like this one from me, you'd better get moving because only one person will ever get one and my girlfriend looks like she is the odds-on favorite.<p>This strikes me as optimizing for the somewhat quirky preference set of a group of people who do not pay money for software. (People who do pay money for software have an easy mechanism for determining what they are owed: check the contract, if it says you're owed it, you're owed it, if not, you're not.) Their opinion may, possibly, be relevant, but I wouldn't really go out of my way for it without a darn good reason for why.<p>There are few startups on HN for whom API stability 18 months from now is a life-or-death issue for their startup. There are, almost certainly, juicier fruits which hang lower for your marketing than guaranteeing your API stability in the event of an acquisition or death of your startup.<p>If you doubt this, please, post a statement of User Rights or what have you on your website. Count the clicks to it. People's revealed preference is that they <i>do not care</i>. They might think they care, they might even say they care ("How dare this Mobisocifotogame that I read about on HN close without letting me download the 5 minutes of attention I put into it in a convenient-to-use XML file?!"), but <i>they do not make decisions based on this</i>. Spend your time on things that actually influence decisions they make, like e.g. button colors. Seriously. Tweaking button color on your signup form will, <i>provably</i>, do more for your business than optimizing for the opinions of folks who flit between new web services like mayflies with less spending power.

A one-size-fits-all is not going to work, I think.<p>The correct model is probably something similar to the Creative Commons model -- create a few bundles of rights, let creators/site operators compose them, creating a 2x2 matrix of licenses or whatever.<p>For instance: 1) Ownership of content/derived rights 2) Persistence of terms through exit (bankruptcy, sale, change of control...) 3) Revocability (can never, can easily, or can after N day waiting period during which users may delete all data, or opt in/out of new terms...) 4) Law enforcement: we'll actively bend over/cooperate like eBay, or we will require warrants and resist to the extent legally allowed, or technical countermeasures, plus which jurisdictions (I'm usually fine with USA law, but wouldn't want my content under e.g. Saudi law) 5) ...<p>This matters more for power users and API users (developers) than for casual users, but I agree something like this is necessary.

I am developer at a small start up, in terms of company size at least. There are only 4 people in the company and I the only full time developer. The CEO is technical and writes code half of the time himself as well. Though, while small in size, we have roughly 1.5M uniques per month. Only a small part our service is read only / consumption based (the forums and other social networking features). Based on the nature of what our service does we end up collecting a lot of information on all of our users. Non financial information, but most of the information we have about users they would never want other people to know or find out about. Each day the average active user gives about 10-15 new bits of information (willing-fully, thats why they use our service, we are not just tracking users to get the information).<p>That being said, a lot of users when they close their account contact us and demand us to verify we have deleted all of our their information. We do our best to anonymize by blanking out their name, location, email address, etc... in our database. Then we mark the account no longer active.<p>However, we can never confirm their data is fully gone. We can not retroactively go back and remove them from our countless number of backups. We snapshot ever night and keep the backups for differing amount of time. Since we can never get rid of them via the backups, which basically are just as good (if stolen, leaked, etc..) as the data in our live database we can never confirm their data has been deleted.<p>Would this mean we would be breaking this code of conduct? If so, that would make this code of conduct way to burdensome for any start up or company to follow.<p>(Not to mention other things in there besides the data retention policy that make this way to much for any start up to promise to follow)

These sound all nice and friendly, but they're not feasible for me. If you've paid me, use the service for a time, then ask me to delete all data associated with your account, I've got nothing to fight a chargeback with.<p>Shutting down after losing a patent (or other) lawsuit, then open sourcing the aplicable software seems wrought of peril.<p>6 months notice is feasible for a paid service, but not so much for a free one.

it seems pretty restrictive<p>in the early stage you are required to build extra features....and in the later stage you are requiring the acquirer to agree to this

How many startups actually shut down? When I say shutdown I mean close the doors, unplug the servers, delete all code and walk away?<p>If there is any significant codebase, isn't that at least worth something? Sell it off to the highest bidder?<p>I think the open source clause under shutdowns is going to be rare.

This seems like an anti-pivot poison pill.

What are some typical contractual agreements for user data of an acquired startup, between the acquirer and the startup?

anybody remembers the blogger code of ethics? what happened to it? what was its impact (if any)?

This kills off the root motivation to be Samaritan with power. If everyone can copy and paste instead of reinventing it, dealing with double binds and trade offs,they'll grow to put less weight on caring for user interest.