The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out.
Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack.
I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefully, but it does not happen all the time.
What are they saying in essence? Don't depend on closed source services? Don't depend on non-creative commons Wired articles for your news as they may shut down one day? People make a calculus. This option is closed source, but offers this advantage. I know, as any business, they may disappear and I'm left holding the bag, but I'm willing to take that chance, given the advantages. This is also the case for open source software, but, yes, OSS has the advantage that someone with sufficient need and resources could resurrect the project.
Fine, they have a preference for open source. That's great. We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
Because code isn't a good that spoils. When someone shuts their door to my favorite restaurant, the presumption is that they were losing money, and needed to close the doors. When my favorite SaaS service shuts down, it's the same deal.
This is different. They're just being selfish because they got some money, giving the middle finger to everyone. That same code is still sitting in a git repo somewhere, and that's frustrating as hell to anyone that trusted them. It would be no sweat off their backs to at least scale down support over a year to let people transition.
But let's not place the blame on them. It's probably not their choice to fuck over all of their users. I guarantee this is coming from Apple, and you should all remember that when you line up to buy this new fancy 1 port macbook: Fuck Apple, they don't give a shit about open source. They're embrace/extend/extinguish just as Microsoft. They just operate on Unix so it feels like they give us more.
It's okay though. Someone inside will realize they're sitting on a goldmine of information on how to make good software, they'll leave the hellish work environment that is Apple, write an open source version, and it will be superior.
>We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
There is no "short of that". Demand open source for everything you do. It's not unreasonable. The modern computer ecosystem IS open source.
You are very much overstating the similarities from open source developers disappearing and a closed source software company leaving you up to dry. One can live on, and one has no hope.
> We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well.
So in essence we as humans would probably be better off expecting things to disappear instead of the opposite maybe? Not sure I can do that, but still, seems like a more fitting strategy.
At least you usually have runway. If your favorite OSS project closes its doors, you probably have a year or three until bitrot finally closes the doors. Same goes for many closed-source softwares, and physical products.
With a closed-source service on somebody else's servers, they can turn it off tomorrow and it's just gone.
"We have made the decision to evolve our company mission and, as of today, we will no longer offer downloads." is the least respectful and most opaque phrase I've ever heard. What would have been the risk of something more honest and direct?
Seriously. This is beyond crass. Not 2 months ago, I came this close to betting on and recommending FoundationDB. Today I would have been swimming in a world of shit (not to mention wasted time) had I recommended these guys.
I'm never one to begrudge exits, but they blew this. Even if financial circumstances meant they had to turn down the product, there are way better ways to do that before yanking everything and disappearing.
Dave Scherer, Dave Rosenthal: I hope you're stocking up for a long cozy retirement at Apple. I honestly don't know how you expect to be trusted by a faithful early adopter ever again.
Indeed - this reads as "we no longer need you, the customer, so screw you". Not a good look for anyone who is looking to move on from this company, especially if they are in management and presumably would have had something to say about how things wound down.
Maybe something more is at play here than just the founders and team cutting access to years of their work.
Could also be something to do with a certain company who doesn't like you to have access to (certain) assets of their acquisition after it went through. I mean, they did the same thing with TestFlight. janking Android support directly after the acquisition (and closing it altogether a while later) and Logic (yanking Windows support directly after the acquisition and making the product OSX exclusive).
You could say Apple really is quite ruthless and basically acts like a asshole when it comes to acquisitions, even though their CEO seems to be quite a nice and gentle person (at least after work hours)
It's odd that they imply foundation db has a strength in scalable performance that other no sql databases do not which would be handy for financial applications but then fail to mention apple pay as a potential use case.
Despite the fact that this is not only happen in Apple specific case as the title suggest and probably, a quite generalization of what Apple do to the company it bought, the article raises a good point to carefully decide what technology solution you use for your company.
We have to expect that any product that we used might come to an end someday, and need to make sure that we at least have an escape plan for that.
At least Apple makes puts it out of its misery quickly, unlike the likes of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, who have been known to let products of acquired companies live on like zombies before finally "sunsetting" them.
How often haven't we read the whole fake happy "we're so excited, but nothing will change" press releases? Those have become a running joke.
I imagine it's impossible in practice, but it's fun to entertain theoretically. Right now it seems GOOG has a market cap of $383.11B and Apple has $178B on hand [1].
The article cites CouchDB as how this kind of thing can play out differently for open-source software. The first example that came to my mind was Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and the subsequent MySQL forks (e.g. MariaDB). Of course, we still have MySQL today, and AFAIK it remains to be seen what will happen to FoundationDB. I doubt Apple will kill it.
I'd still like to know what Apple is going to do with PrimeSense. Thanks to that purchase, I have to rely on used Kinects for all of my depth sensing needs.
If this acquisition was in any way related to Apple wanting to use this product in-house -- call me massively confused. It really would be a mental sickness if Apple were so insistent on using closed-source tech across the organization, even while that is a very obscure line of thinking amongst it's competitors in the cloud space. On the other hand, if Apple is acqui-hiring these guys -- then why kill the download links instantly? So yeah, either way, seems like a poorly handled situation
Just because the tech companies we read about on hacker news rely on and contribute to open source, doesn't mean that its a 'mental sickness' to use proprietary products. There's good workloads for open source (Apple uses hadoop/hbase heavily internally), and then theres unique proprietary solutions.
To combine this with another comment, free and closed source means that at some point, many of those users will be massively disappointed. I can think of very few exceptions.
> Like other NoSQL databases, FoundationDB offered a way to build databases that spanned hundreds or thousands of different servers, often housed in geographically distant data centers.
What?
> FoundationDB promised a way to provide scalability without sacrificing performance
I understand that FoundationDB's main point of differentiation from other NoSQL document DBs was support for transactional integrity across documents. Others (i.e. all open-source options, AFAIK) support atomic transactions only on a single document.
Sounds like the author had been told this, didn't quite get it, and mumbled this stuff instead.
"That leaves companies that depended on that software out of luck. And when startups suffer, so does innovation."
Uhhh except that their existence outright is in itself innovation. Removing their existence cannot reduce innovation since their initial existence furthered it.
cliffs: article is dumb and author is an idiot. at least i think, i had to stop reading the article.
[+] [-] mc32|11 years ago|reply
Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack.
I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefully, but it does not happen all the time.
What are they saying in essence? Don't depend on closed source services? Don't depend on non-creative commons Wired articles for your news as they may shut down one day? People make a calculus. This option is closed source, but offers this advantage. I know, as any business, they may disappear and I'm left holding the bag, but I'm willing to take that chance, given the advantages. This is also the case for open source software, but, yes, OSS has the advantage that someone with sufficient need and resources could resurrect the project.
Fine, they have a preference for open source. That's great. We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
[+] [-] nickysielicki|11 years ago|reply
Because code isn't a good that spoils. When someone shuts their door to my favorite restaurant, the presumption is that they were losing money, and needed to close the doors. When my favorite SaaS service shuts down, it's the same deal.
This is different. They're just being selfish because they got some money, giving the middle finger to everyone. That same code is still sitting in a git repo somewhere, and that's frustrating as hell to anyone that trusted them. It would be no sweat off their backs to at least scale down support over a year to let people transition.
But let's not place the blame on them. It's probably not their choice to fuck over all of their users. I guarantee this is coming from Apple, and you should all remember that when you line up to buy this new fancy 1 port macbook: Fuck Apple, they don't give a shit about open source. They're embrace/extend/extinguish just as Microsoft. They just operate on Unix so it feels like they give us more.
It's okay though. Someone inside will realize they're sitting on a goldmine of information on how to make good software, they'll leave the hellish work environment that is Apple, write an open source version, and it will be superior.
>We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
There is no "short of that". Demand open source for everything you do. It's not unreasonable. The modern computer ecosystem IS open source.
You are very much overstating the similarities from open source developers disappearing and a closed source software company leaving you up to dry. One can live on, and one has no hope.
[+] [-] saganus|11 years ago|reply
And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well.
So in essence we as humans would probably be better off expecting things to disappear instead of the opposite maybe? Not sure I can do that, but still, seems like a more fitting strategy.
[+] [-] rsync|11 years ago|reply
When I read that, I immediately thought of craigslist, for some reason.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
With a closed-source service on somebody else's servers, they can turn it off tomorrow and it's just gone.
[+] [-] logicallee|11 years ago|reply
obviously you're not an actuary but lay some odds that twitter folds tomorrow. (literally; overnight.)
[+] [-] treve|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grrowl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mik3y|11 years ago|reply
I'm never one to begrudge exits, but they blew this. Even if financial circumstances meant they had to turn down the product, there are way better ways to do that before yanking everything and disappearing.
Dave Scherer, Dave Rosenthal: I hope you're stocking up for a long cozy retirement at Apple. I honestly don't know how you expect to be trusted by a faithful early adopter ever again.
[+] [-] mb_72|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrash|11 years ago|reply
Could also be something to do with a certain company who doesn't like you to have access to (certain) assets of their acquisition after it went through. I mean, they did the same thing with TestFlight. janking Android support directly after the acquisition (and closing it altogether a while later) and Logic (yanking Windows support directly after the acquisition and making the product OSX exclusive).
You could say Apple really is quite ruthless and basically acts like a asshole when it comes to acquisitions, even though their CEO seems to be quite a nice and gentle person (at least after work hours)
[+] [-] santosha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Handwash|11 years ago|reply
We have to expect that any product that we used might come to an end someday, and need to make sure that we at least have an escape plan for that.
[+] [-] makeitsuckless|11 years ago|reply
How often haven't we read the whole fake happy "we're so excited, but nothing will change" press releases? Those have become a running joke.
[+] [-] ido|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taspeotis|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-cash-178-bil...
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidgerard|11 years ago|reply
This is something you learn after getting burnt by a vendor of $L33T_TOOL_OF_THE_DAY a few times.
[+] [-] ademarre|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitrogen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capkutay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bobbles|11 years ago|reply
Edit: Ah.. its on the community page: http://community.foundationdb.com/
[+] [-] pmorici|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pje|11 years ago|reply
What?
> FoundationDB promised a way to provide scalability without sacrificing performance
Wait, what?
[+] [-] fineline|11 years ago|reply
Sounds like the author had been told this, didn't quite get it, and mumbled this stuff instead.
[+] [-] spectrum1234|11 years ago|reply
Uhhh except that their existence outright is in itself innovation. Removing their existence cannot reduce innovation since their initial existence furthered it.
cliffs: article is dumb and author is an idiot. at least i think, i had to stop reading the article.
[+] [-] geofft|11 years ago|reply