Ask HN: What's the longest you've worked on a side project, without finishing?

I've been working on my side project startup for quite some time, depending on how exactly you define when it began. Some of the ideas date back to around 2006 or so. But that was really a different project, but it definitely influenced the current project. But none of the code from back then is still in use.

More realistically, the current project really started sometime in 2010, best as I can remember. The earliest bug in the issue tracker is dated 12 Jul 2010, and the earliest commit in the old SVN repo is dated Wed, 07 Jul 2010. And the oldest entry on the "news" page of our website is also 07-12-2010. The domain name was registered 03-apr-2005, but that's only because I thought of the name, thought "hey, that might be useful one day" and registered it and sat on it until I needed a name/domain for something. The legal entity was officially created on 6/2/2009, but even that's not completely indicative of reality, as I formed the legal entity originally with the plan to be a one man consulting company... but I never really did any consulting at the time, and later when I wanted to do a product based company, I just re-purposed the name/domain.

And that's the history of Fogbeam Labs in far too many words...

As far as finishing... well, it'll never be finished, like fashion's never finished. :-) That said, we have issued releases of our open source projects, and from a commercial standpoint we have two products that have been in "Limited Availability" status for a while. So we have something you can consider shipping, but we don't think we're anywhere near done.

Years :(

Mine's are still going. :) One for 2.5 years, another for 2. I don't think I'll stop any time though, I've gotten into this groove of doing small bits each day.

15 years...axiom-developer.org

Of course the project has a "30 year horizon" so ....

In my 28-year career I've noted that if a project has not been fielded 2 years after its announcement, it fails.