Their idea was to build a company around a product for building "community-owned" software and for all the software they would make it easier for the creators to get paid.
I've only checked a few of the repos but it looks like their license is AGPLv3. I'm hoping that this has raised the awareness of non-MIT licenses for web developers and that others are more willing to share their code and support free software.
It'll be nice to use more than just Wordpress as an example of GPL'd software ;-)
-Rudolf
Full text of their shutdown announcement:
> Assembly launched in 2013 with the vision to bring engineers, designers, and creators all over the world together to build community-owned software products.
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> Over the last two years we've been honored to see the internet do what it does best on Assembly: bring people together to accomplish more together than what one could on their own. More than 4 million people used products built by the Assembly Community, and we had the privilege to facilitate payments of thousands of dollars a month to individual contributors. The Assembly Community achieved much.
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>We set out with ambitious plans but failed to reach the escape velocity necessary to turn the Assembly product into a sustainable company. With limited resources we are unable to continue support of the product, and we will be shutting down assembly.com on December 6th. Products on Assembly have always been built openly, and their source code as well as Assembly's will remain on GitHub for posterity.
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> We're grateful to all who supported us and sorry for any inconvenience the shutdown causes.