It sucks that Parse got shuttered, but this has got to be one of the best handled service shutdowns I've seen in a while.

If only geocities had been handled this way. It's amazing how many big services of yesteryear shutter without anyone archiving or transitioning them. Kudos to Facebook for doing such a great job!

I have to say, this whole open source turnaround from Parse is pretty awesome... I've used Parse in the past and this effort is making me consider using it again, just hosted on my own server. Thanks guys!

Parse is quickly becoming the model of how you wind down a SaaS startup.

You guys are going out in style! Nice work.

Awesome! This is almost the last missing piece for a true Parse.com replacement.

So they decided they don't want to maintain the business and the infrastructure to support commercial Parse service. But they decided they would create an open source version, which is currently maintained by the engineers paid by Facebook to work on Parse. So going forward, Facebook will likely continue to handle the Parse platform project?

Kudos to the great handling of a decommission service, but at the same time, is it good to pay engineers to work on business product which you have just killed?

I would guess that the FB engineers won't work on it for more than a few months and probably not at all after the shutdown.

More likely, Zuckerberg realizes that the best way to control developers and build an Internet-wide platform is to control the (open source) code they're using. Parse is the backend version of React in terms of developer turf wars.

The parse service may be shutting down, but the parse platform will only grow in popularity, and Facebook will continue to benefit from the control it exerts over the decision making of developers.