One month ago, we informed Copycopter customers that we would be shutting the service down on April 15th and they would no longer be charged.

This news triggered a domino effect across the internet. AOL followed up by shutting down Instant Messenger. Milk then shut down Oink and users are fretting that Posterous will shut down after its acquisition by Twitter.

Copycopter has worked beautifully for its purpose: editing live copy in Rails app using the I18n (internalization) API.

However, as a business, we try to make money and Copycopter has not served that purpose very well. So, we’ve been spending our time on other things.

It is open source!

It’s not really cool to run a service, then abruptly shut it down. We want to be awesome to our paying customers, many of whom still want to use the service. Copycopter is fantastic if you’re into Rails, translations, and not editing code and deploying every time copy changes. Open source code is the bee’s knees.

All the code has been moved over to the “copycopter” organization on GitHub. There, you’ll also find the Ruby client and a tight little style guide.

The fine folks at Crowdtap and Iora Health, two very strong Rails teams in New York and Boston, respectively.

They both use Copycopter for their own production apps.

Follow these instructions.

Or, watch this instructional, holiday-themed screencast:

Follow these instructions.

Thank you to all of Copycopter’s customers. We’re sorry we can no longer run the service but we’d be even sorrier if we gave you a half-assed effort.

We’re thrilled to be able to give Copycopter new life as an open source project and extremely grateful to the folks at Crowdtap and Iora Health for maintaining it.

We know them well from working together in the past. You might even call us friends.

Since open source is about people, you should get to know their handsome faces:

Get to the choppah!