Addendum to: Why Doesn’t Bruce just sell? in What's up

If any or all of the speculation in my previous entry applies, the time-cost to mitigate could be as much as the investment to improve the site to profitability. It is evident he is unwilling—or doesn’t know how—to make those improvements, so I doubt he is willing to invest the time to facilitate a successful sale. He needs to make a living, and it is understandable if that is his primary focus.

I don’t think he “owes” us the truth about his reasons. It’s a business, not a friendship. All he owes us is the service promised for the dollars paid. His reasons are his reasons, and the site is his site. Do I think he has managed it well? No. I think he has squandered a great deal of potential and good will.

I also think he was never a savvy businessman. He developed OD as a programming experiment that grew beyond his ability to manage. He has maintained it as long as he could and he hasn’t brought it forward in any substantial way in years.

There are several ways to sell a business other than lock-stock-and-barrel. You can sell only the assets and leave the debt to the previous owners, but not if those assets are encumbered and usually not if the new owners retain the business name (in this case the URL, which is the primary asset of value as well.) To transfer the URL, any hosting fees would have to be brought current and those could be substantial.

Finally, a well-known developer left a private note on my last entry suggesting the code may be so convoluted and undocumented as to be useless, or perhaps embarrassing, to expose. At best it exists on a dated platform, incompatible with current technologies and expensive to migrate.

What would a sale look like to us end-users anyway? Probably not what “we” think or would prefer. Any developer and keen businessperson would bring the technology up to current standards, implement improvements in functionality and express their own vision for the site and the community. Every time Bruce made a change there were uprisings and complaints. A new owner may be more communicative, but it is unlikely they would maintain the site in the way we know it today.

So here we are, at least many of us, on ProseBox. A site developed on today’s technology, by a seemingly-involved, invested, communicative owner with a plan. It looks different, it feels different, and it’s going to take some getting used to—exactly what you could expect from OD in a successful transition.

Yes, the URL is different. If it makes you feel better, you can rename your bookmark “Ghost of OD.”