The Business of Software

The eBay auction ( http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7554979251&fromMakeTrack=true ) mentioned in this thread ( http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.230201.7 ) has ended and I must say that I'm quite surprised at how much the winning bid was!

What's your take on this?  Has anyone ever considered selling their product's source code on eBay?  Do you think there is a market for this stuff?

I am not very used to eBay auctions but a quick look at the bidding history for this item suggests that the price has been artificially increased to reach such a high level.

I don't see anything too odd about the bids, unless you mean the sequences of bids by the same person with no intermediary bids (avianflu). That happens when a bid is placed by someone else and avianflu has a higher bid outstanding - you don't pay your bid, you pay x more than the next highest guy pays and ebay resolves the conflict in the background and their bid is never even seen in some cases.

The price seems reasonable for what you get.

Am I reading well? $100,000.00.

Wow, that's amazing.

A one time $100,000 payment...uh, and that's the end of it...it should be bringing in more than that every year.  Sounds like poor quality or the seller has given it away.

It could also be a fake bid, just like many other fake high bids for unusual items (unusual for being sold on eBay).

$100,000 is barely enough to live off of for one year...and the person has just sold off the total rights to the source...sounds like the seller got screwed...unless it's beta software.

"$100,000 is barely enough to live off of for one year"

Where do you live?

> "$100,000 is barely enough to live off of for one year"

After the taxes are paid (in USA/California or New York at least) you will be left with about $60,000.

If you are living a graduate student life style that might last a few years.

If you are into adulthood, and especially if you have any family, that will sustain a semi-middle class life for about a year.

If you live in a lower tax area, and in the USA, in a small town, for instance, it might last for two years, but not much longer.

> Am I reading well? $100,000.00.

100K would pay for a decent programmer fully funded with all expenses for about 4 months.

This way they have the code, the have a business name, a lot of the risk is gone.

A program of significant size, fully debugged, is probably worth much more that 100K to anyone who can make business use of it.

I and presumably others would appreciate it if the OP would post back here when payment of the full amount has actually been received. Good luck and well done.

We were the winning bidders for this product. It came at a luck time for us as we have a client who wants to make just this business. Our client will be paying around $300k for this so it making sense for us to do.

Indeed, source code is cheap, but the cost of an established, popular search engine website is not.

Try selling the source code to your FTP shareware application, see if you get more than $100!

This reminds me of a quote by Paul Graham on selling startup ideas:

"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."

[rest of that essay is here: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html]

>startup ideas are not million dollar ideas

Ideas aren't worth much, since there are few unique ones. Completed programs are worth good money, however, provided they

1) work

 and

2) meet a real need

and

3) there aren't reasonable open source or cheaply licensed alternatives

I've recently posted my digital photo management product on eBay. Here's a link to the related JoS post:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.241166.2

wow, anyone really believe someone would be stupid enough to fork over US$100K for that? Were you allowed to look at the source code first? Otherwise you really only bought undocumented visitation and not much at that.

"We did not track unique visitors. Instead, we focused on the number of searches. At its peak, jux2 was doing 17K searches per day. But 10K searches per day is a more typical number"

Yeah .. and who would believe the logs anyhow.

"Over one man-year of development time went into jux2"

What difference does that make? Are people taking this fair trade stuff beyond the purchase of coffee? What a joke.

"We are currently using screenscraping to get search results."

And so did I back in 2000. Is this not 2005? If the screens change, what will the scrape find. Talk about ugly code, screen scraping is ugly.

I got a bridge.

Guys I was thinking of selling my software on eBay - including its application source code and website.
How much u think I should put it up for or do u think I should just sell the product and never sell up???

It is some <a href="http://www.auctionswatch.info">Ebay auction software</a>

Let me know please!

Gaz