My grandfather was a mechanic in the Enola Gay's bomber group. He mentioned that his personal bar for heat and humidity are from some of the islands they setup airfields on in the Pacific. Considering he spent a fair amount of his career following that war in LA maintaining the B52 air wings I tend to wonder why more of them aren't wearing shirts.
I think one of the most interesting points about the presentation is the BubbleWrap libraries. The greatest pain I've felt with iOS development are some of the terrible APIs. The amount of ceremony needed to Parse JSON from a web based API request or to access the camera is almost absurd.
Or perhaps 37signals is of a size that losing a small % of subscriptions due to an issue is considerably larger cost than placing a couple of people on-call to deal with it immediately.
Disclosure: I'm one of the maintainers of the new Copycopter.
When the announcement that Copycopter was to be shut down both Crowdtap and Iora Health reached out to Thoughtbot about keeping the service alive. Dan Croak facilitated communication between us and began the thankless job of putting the application in a state that we could deploy and maintain the codebase.
I believe this transition was a ton more than just opening a repository on Github. Dan engaged interested members of the community and has helped us get to the point in which we can carry the service forward. It was handled very well from my point of view.
Thoughtbot isn't actually a VC backed startup. They have always developed products by building tools to fit needs in their consultancy work and unfortunately not all the products were successful enough to keep going.
The reality for Copycopter is that it's a really useful item in the Rails developers toolkit. It didn't find a wide enough audience within the community which is what eventually doomed it as a SaaS. The cost of spending even 5-10 hours a week working on it burns more capital than I imagine it generated as a SaaS. That's why I think it's a perfect fit of an OSS project.