entp, the company behind Lighthouse, open-sourced their Warehouse product. This is great news by itself, I am more interested in why they did it.

It makes sense. Git is gaining market share and other companies are creating web-based git repository browsers (github for example) so entp’s SVN client Warehouse is losing terrain. Most companies would highlight why their product is still better than the competition but not so for entp:

The fact is, we (and most of our target audience) moved from subversion to git or mercurial. Also, the Logical Awesome guys scare us. First, there’s their kick ass git commit browser out there that embodies the spirit of git exceptionally well. Then, they prove that they can do Subversion hosting better than us. Yikes.

What company uses words like “scare us” to describe their competitor? Wait, that’s only the start. They don’t only admit there is something better out there. They don’t only give away the source code for free, they also refund their customers.

What happens to the current customers? We’ll be issuing refunds to anyone that’s bought in the last two months (that’s as far as PayPal will go back). Anyone else that feels they should get a refund can contact me and we’ll work something out.

This is the kind of company I can appreciate. Eventually I think this makes them more trustworthy and transparent. A bold move, bravo!