Posted 08/19/09 at 07:00:11 PM by David Murphy

I suppose it's not enough for a popular online service to face the reaper, come back from the brink of extinction, and turn open-source. No, there has to be some kind of controversy surrounding the whole affair--can't just fade quietly into the open-licensed light nowadays.

Such is the situation offered up by the death and resurrection of tr.im, a popular online URL shortening service whose recent entrance into the open-source community has been met with a touch of scandal. Perhaps scandal is the wrong word, though. Scathing might be better, given the tone of some of tr.im's blogging and actions as of late.

It's easy to talk about open-source as if it's some large, altruistic community that wants to do nothing but share-and-share alike. Everybody's friendly. Everybody's happy. Just a ton of developers churning out free code for everyone to use, distribute, and polish into a scintillating hunk of software that's going to revolutionize the world! Or, at the very least, stick it to Microsoft.

This is an idyllic fantasy. In the real world, businesses and developers don't always play nicely. You've already read about the back-and-forth bombing wars between the PortableApps and LiberKey developers. You can now add tr.im to the list... but who exactly are they fighting?

Click the jump to spawn onto the open-source battlefield!

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Posted 08/13/09 at 02:04:21 PM by Paul Lilly

URL shortening services are all well and good, but what happens when one of them goes down? If that happens, you're looking at a lot of dead links, whether they appear in forum posts or magazine articles. That appeared to be the case with tr.im, who recently went offline but is back up and running.

"We have restored tr.im and re-opened its website," tr.im wrote in a blog. "We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive."

The blog post went on to complain that bit.ly "has a monopoly position" in the URL shortening business that it cannot compete with, not unless "Twitter offers choice." Nevertheless, tr.im vowed to keep operating indefinitely while the service considers its financial options for the future.

Full blog post here - http://tr.im/wlgC

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