It’s been almost a year now since I stopped active development on FreeMarket. Over the summer I’ve received some inquiries from people interested in using the software who are wondering where the source code – indeed the entire FreeMarket Website – has gone. There were a number of reasons why I pulled the plug:

   1. Support. This is the big one. As a law student I have new priorities now and I can’t help people get a sometimes-ornery software package up and running. Even though I officially stopped supporting the package last fall, making it available on a strictly caveat downloador basis, people would still run into problems with their installations that they were desperate for me to diagnose. It’s just a fact of life online now that people expect software – even free, practically abandoned software – to be supported by its coder. So people were often frustrated when they couldn’t get more than a two-line email out of me. I can sympathize with that – I’ve certainly had my patience tried by many an unresponsive developer – and I don’t want to be in the position of adding to the not-ready-for-primetime reputation of Free software.
   2. PHP and MySQL are evolving, and I don’t have the time to continue to test it for the new releases, and each new change to the default install makes it even more likely that the scripts won’t work as intended. This compounds the support issue. I wanted FreeMarket to be something I could be proud of, and not just another piece of buggy, abandoned software.
   3. The web is different these days. And not just AJAX – people have different design expectations. FM just felt a little too 2005.
   4. I have to face reality. Throughout my 1L year I entertained the fantasy that when summer rolled around I would have time to patch FM back into shape and make it purr. That didn’t happen, and if 2L year continues to be as crazy as the last month it never will.

I still think a lot about the predictive power of markets, and I hope that the next election year will bring a new rush of interest into the field (IEM is a reliable election-year slow-news-day filler). Hopefully, that will ignite some interest in the scripting community in creating a truly free and flexible PM platform.

And hopefully those developers won’t decide to go to law school.

September 4th, 2007