Sourcegraph went dark

Sourcegraph CEO here. We made our main internal codebase (for our code search product) private. We did this to focus. It added a lot of extra work and risk to have stuff be open source and public. We gotta stay focused on building a great code search/intelligence product for our customers.

That's what ultimately lets us still do plenty of things for devs and the OSS community:

(1) Our super popular public code search is at https://sourcegraph.com/search, which is the same product customers use internally on their own codebases. We spend millions of dollars annually on this public instance with almost 1M OSS repositories to help out everyone using OSS (and we love when they like it so much they bring it into their company :-).

(2) We also have still have a ton of open-source code, like https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/cody (our code AI tool).

BTW, if any founders out there are wondering whether they should make their own code open-source or public, happy to chat! Email in profile. I think it could make sense for a lot of companies, but more so for infrastructure products or client tools, not so much for full server-side end-user applications.

I used to always point to Sourcegraph as a company that really understood dev culture and what it took to make devs happy, so this slow transition has definitely been painful to watch.

Just yesterday someone asked for an example of a public roadmap for a technical product, so I spent some time looking for Sourcegraph's, only to find out that they've also made most of their docs private. The public handbook was an amazing resource before, now it's been moved to Notion, and most of the interesting bits are links to private Google documents (which they used to do only for financial documents and other stuff that obviously needed to stay private).

Sad!

They also recently(?) silently destroyed[1] their public search index at sourcegraph.com/search. Since GitHub only recently got a working search and even that is behind login, I used to search a lot using Sourcegraph. It even supported searching GitLab.

Now it seems that all GitLab repos are gone from the index and a huge number of GitHub repos as well. If I can't trust the search I'll just have no choice but to fall back to GitHub.

It's a shame since their index was at some point even better than GitHub's own, although GitHub seems to have caught up.

[1] https://community.sourcegraph.com/t/most-public-repos-no-lon...

It's a bit sad. I forked ~~the last~~ an open-source version some time ago[0]. I removed the telemetry, disabled updates, removed the proprietary code, made a docker image, and implemented some lightweight oauth2/oauth2-proxy authentication.

I plan to keep it running behind Oauth2-Proxy for a long time. It has been very reliable software and because it's behind a supposedly secure proxy, I don't feel bad about not updating it.

[0] https://github.com/SINTEF/sourcegraph

Damn, I use Sourcegraph so much for my reverse engineering efforts on macOS. They index all those private framework symbols that people extract on every macOS release, and allow searching for headers and even how they are called by other developers that were ahead of me.

A big part of https://lunar.fyi exists thanks to Sourcegraph search. Even now I'm using it to find a way to enable the second monitor on M3 MacBooks without needing to close the lid [1].

I really hope this is not a sign of them taking back the ability to search in the future.

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/turn-off-macbook-display-clams...

Straight-up making all dev work private is very weird and perplexing. Why would their business model (which they had since some time, mind you) require not only a proprietary/"open core" license, which I would understand, but complete secrecy around source code itself? What business goal couldn't be accomplished with licensing restrictions alone? And is that difference in potential income generated by this new secret-requiring business model so big that it justifies throwing away the entire "open nature" of the company that has been a core value for most of its existence?

The software Heritage project has archived most of their repo's. Including the main one [1]. Last crawl seems to be of mid July 2024.

[1] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory...

I wonder from all the people commenting here how much they relied on Source Graph, and how many actually paid for it. Running an open-source company is hard, just like running any company is. Sometimes you understand there are things you just can't give out for free, and that's part of maturing as a company.

I'd like to point to the previous episode in this YA drama series:

"Sourcegraph is no longer open source" by me, from last year

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584656

As much as I've have cited, loved, and recommended sourcegraph (even going so far as to help run the open source version at a previous co), I never paid a cent for the product.

I'm curious about the line of thinking in leaving open source behind, but it seems somewhat unsurprising in that lens.

Sourcegraph search is amazing. I can point to any hash in our repo and search by regex/path regex. Results are instant and in json format. I hacked together a 'cs' script in bash using the sg cli client and some git calls, as I missed Google's cs command since leaving. Works perfectly, faster than ctags/any local indexer.

What happened to sourcegraph is very sad. It was a great tool, and the kind of software you wish the apache foundation was managing.

I've been looking for alternatives - any recommendations?

The sourcegraph folks are great. I think these days is a brutal period for startups. I can only guess how things are going. Just yesterday FT.com was publishing "Start-up failures rise 60% as founders face hangover from boom years"[1].

Like Cockroach's recent relicensing, I think we should be thankful for the good years and awesome stuff the last boom era brought, and not be too harsh on the principled founders who now find themselves having to make hard decisions. They're responsible to a lot of people at the end of the day - investors but also employees. Just crashing the whole thing to make a moral statement would be dumb. Employees also count on execs to care for them.

If startups have to make hard decisions to keep things afloat, it's the right thing to do.

** I'm extrapolating a lot here from this post, for all I know things may be rosey at SourceGraph, idk!

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/2808ad4c-783f-4475-bcda-bddc02990...

> All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were drafted, reviewed, and catalogued in a public Google Drive folder

Does this still exist somewhere?

If you're looking for a Lucene-based search index with a nice UI here's one: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka

Kinda weird because they have already relicensed the entire repo recently. I wonder what problem they are trying to solve with a private repo.

Can’t wait for Steve Yegge putting out a huge article about how this is a great thing and comparing it to TV shows or something.

I guess I wish it was still open but want to reiterate how appreciative I am for the public free search. It's so amazingly useful while doing CS research to search through all of github with regez that way

Open source? More like trojan horse. Nothing is "open" unless it has a GNU licence.

They’re probably courting a buyer.

That seems silly. Hope there will be an official statement (apology? lol).

Preparing to get bought by Microsoft?

Another group of source snakes to add to the collaboration/purchase/business blacklist. Quinn S., Beyang L., etc. are individuals happy to ride on FOSS until they're big enough to cash out. OK. Just be upfront about it. "We did this to focus" - no, you did it to make more money. Jesus, be honest - you're talking to developers, not your investors, we can smell the BS from across the Atlantic.

IMO they went dark because they were forced to pivot to AI to survive, soft-abandoning their core mission of expanding developer literacy.

Their biggest business problem is that they can’t win at that mission in a way that nets the company a win, because the tools they use for basic literacy are all downstream of Github’s. Every time they improve something to gain a competitive advantage they end up giving the same advantage to their biggest competitor. Even their AI tech is downstream of their competitors’!

I mean, I used to have a lot more respect for Steve Yegge, but his post about joining SG was one of the last optimistic things written about the Sourcegraph platform, and one of the last genuinely optimistic things Steve has written (that also made me optimistic). I absolutely loved watching Prime disassemble Steve’s current view of the world in the most still-grounded-in-reality way possible.

Disclaimer: I am the author of a competing technology (BABLR), am banned from the Sourcegraph Discord for agitating for change, and am now CEO of the newly-born Silphium Labs: an org with the same mission as Sourcegraph but which still believes in transparency, open source, and the realistic possibility of bringing no-cost code literacy to everyone in the world

Build cultural capital on being loud about how you're open source, vibes, and a cool podcast. Pivot aggressively and crumble to realistic business challenges when the core business model (code search) gets eaten by Github (their code search), then try to act like nothing happened while pushing the new product and gaslighting existing users as you try to convince them the actually want Cody, not the code search. Which is to say, unsurprising.

Don't start your company as open source. It will attract the wrong customers (the ones who don't give you money but sure like to complain) and detract from building your product. If you can build a successful product, open source it afterwards to give you a competitive advantage without being a drag.