The team behind tr.im announced today that will open source tr.im

Everyone involved at Nambu would like to apologize again for the hastiness in which we acted last Sunday, announcing the shutdown of tr.im by the end of the year. As a commercial URL shortener, however, we still believe that tr.im would not be able to reach enough scale to justify additional investment against the bit.ly/twitter embargo. Therefore, starting today, tr.im will begin its migration into the public domain, becoming 100% community-owned, operated, and developed.

This will be done in september and they will release the source code under MIT open-source license.

On or before September 15, 2009, Nambu, tr.im and I will complete the following:

1. We will renounce all ownership interest in the tr.im domain name and donate it to the community. We will work out the legalities of this over the coming weeks, but it will ensure no one is ever able to hijack tr.im URLs in the future. They will always exist, period. Everyone can use tr.im with confidence.

2. We will release the source code used to implement tr.im for anyone to use, help develop, or privately extend as they like. We will release it under the MIT open-source license. It is our sincere hope that every URL shortener becomes as good or better than tr.im, or can learn from our architecture and feature set.

3. tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data.

If the community can take tr.im to a market share of 5-10% of shortened URLs then the community will own a statistical snapshot of the bit.ly/twitter walled garden, as it pertains to links that are being shared in real-time. By making this complete snapshot available in real-time to anyone that wants it the community will enable anyone to innovate and work on this data as they see fit for whatever purpose, not just bit.ly/twitter and their connected friends.

4. I, Eric Woodward, will personally guarantee any shortfall in tr.im’s operating expenses, indefinitely. We had an issue with tr.im consuming Nambu’s corporate resources, but by assuming this responsibility myself, this issue goes away. I am more than able to do this, and more than willing to do this. The community needs and deserves its own URL shortener.

5. tr.im will begin publishing all statistics and information related to it usage. Its operating cash flow, redirects, URL creation counts — everything — so that the community can have confidence it is on solid footing.

6. tr.im will being accepting donations to help meet its operating expenses, but in a completely transparent and open way.

7. tr.im will add the capability for anyone to use their own domain name on tr.im’s platform, also free of charge, on a donation basis.

And, as a result, Dave Winer has an announcement also. He will open-source the code behind 40twits.

I think it's great. I know that Eric Woodward wanted to move on from tr.im and this gives him the opportunity to do that, but allows the community that's gathered around tr.im to continue. I am part of that community -- having build an application that gets a lot of use, and one that a lot of people want. To match Eric's generosity, I will release the app behind the 40twits site as open source. Let a thousand flowers bloom!