We hadn’t open-sourced it, so this meant any investment had to be done by us at the expense of our main revenue-generating products. While we were busy working on exciting new things, Wasabi stagnated. It was a huge dependency that required a full-time developer — not cheap for a company of our size.
The way I read this article, creating Wasabi a decade ago was not a mistake, given what they were doing and what was available at the time. Not open-sourcing Wasabi was a mistake, though.
I agree. Especially when we first had Wasabi, there were a lot of other legacy ASP code bases lying around, and I think we could've both helped ourselves and gotten more community support by going that route. But it's also worth remembering this was before GitHub; this would've meant a SourceForge account, mailing lists, etc.—a reasonable extra use of resources. It wasn't as trivial a decision then.
The way I read this article, creating Wasabi a decade ago was not a mistake, given what they were doing and what was available at the time. Not open-sourcing Wasabi was a mistake, though.