19 ms·
We Open Source Everything
- rawrmaan 9y agoGood stuff. Sentry does this too and I think it benefits everyone. On the other hand, man that custom font is tough on the eyes.
- ch4s3 9y agoWow, you weren't kidding, that font is rough.
- smoyer 9y agoBut you have to love "Reader Mode" (Firefox Aurora aka Developer Edition 60b06).
- Mononokay 9y agoI actually like it quite a bit for some reason. It's a lot easier to focus on than a typical Sans/Serif font.
- madspindel 9y agoThe fonts name is Kaputt which means broken in german. Looks like a broken version of Campton (another annoying font).
- smoyer 9y agoI don't hate the font so much but the stroke is too light to read easily and the "a" characters look like "o" characters. So it's more a couple of implementation details that make it hard for my old eyes to read.
- craftyguy 9y agoDid they 'open source' that font?
- SippinLean 9y agoIt's a great display face that should not be used for body copy.
- oferzelig 9y agoHope they read this: they have a typo: provides -> provide.
- Mononokay 9y agoFourth paragraph, "sites performance" -> "site's performance"
- discordianfish 9y agoThanks, I've fixed the typos. Indeed not a native speaker, should have re-read it a few times more.
- jotm 9y agoSomething tells me they're not native English speakers, cut them some slack. Better English than many native English writers, anyway.
- nautilus12 9y agoSo the idea is that they are so confident in their human capital, clientele and business processes that even with all of the code no one could potentially compete with them? Or that they want to create more competitors?
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoThis is actually a very good move for them. The type of person who could take the full code dump and stand up the service is likely the type of person who would just write it themselves.
- meredydd 9y agoThey're selling an operational service that their customers can't easily replicate, even with the code. Their product is a globally-distributed monitoring system. Running these systems all over the world, and keeping them running, is a serious operational headache. It's probably at least as complex as operating the service the customer wants to monitor - perhaps a lot more, given that most services are not globally distributed. As long as they price below "double your ops budget", they'll remain value for money - even if the code they use is free.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoOr in short: They're selling a service, not a product, so they can give away the products that they happen to use.
- __s 9y agoCode is a liability
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoBut is open source less or more of a liability?
- __s 9y ago
- bazooka_penguin 9y agoDoes open sourcing everything affect software developers' job prospectives in anyway?
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI have mixed feelings about it, it seems to me giving away your code for no return indicates you don't really value it that much. Whether it will have an affect on the industry I don't know. There was an interesting paper linked on HN a couple of years ago that indicated a lot of the money is disappearing from software sales. The inference was the availability of mysql depresses the revenue from MSSQL, the availability of Linux depresses the revenue from Windows and so on.
- oblio 9y agoIf you think about it, software is a tool, and more than that, it's usually a brick in a construction. I wouldn't expect bricks to go up in price.
- adventist 9y agoSoftware isn't a brick though, it is changing and updating and is a brick that has to be maintained. When you put software bricks together you get a construction that is more powerful than the sum of its parts. It is something inherently valuable in and of itself.
- oblio 9y agoIf I need 1000 software bricks I need for my house, you can’t really convince me to pay a premium for each. Especially since I often have alternative bricks. Psychology plays an important part in how markets work.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoIn the UK the cost of building materials has been soaring over the last couple of years.
- 0xfaded 9y agoI'm going to hijack this thread to mention that I'm thinking of open sourcing a SLAM system I've been working on under BSD or MIT. Ive been working on this because I'm interested in underwater drones (uuvs), and hope to commercialise this in the form of services. My current understanding is as follows: - most open source systems come from universities and are GPL, with the option for licensing. (PTAM, ORB SLAM, DSO, SVO, LSD) - Optimistically, it would require $1-3 million to build a compedative system privately. The sky is the limit here. - No one, neither the universities nor private entities, is making serious money by licensing just a SLAM system. The well performing startups are somehow coupled to a product or a service. - All systems basically solve the same problems, but mix and match different solutions. For example for initial motion estimation, you could rely on constant motion (DSO, ORB SLAM), image alignment (SVO), or solving directly for rotation between cameras (GSLAM). - As a researcher, to implement a new idea, you either need to implement an entire system from scratch, or modify a GPL'd system. This is great in theory, but since everyone is playing the GPL or pay game they are reluctant to accept contributions. I'm imagining something like opencv, with implementations of common algorithms accompanied by wiki pages describing high level details. Components could be mixed and matched into different reference SLAM systems targeting different use cases, do you want something that will run on a MAV or a self driving car? From a commercial point of view, companies could worry more about tweaking things to work for a particular use case without needing to start from scratch. I believe that universities, with their many departments, have more opportunity than anyone else. My belief is that it's time for a liberally licensed SLAM system. Has anyone come to a similar conclusion or care to comment to the contrary? Thanks HN
- stealthcat 9y agoCan companies really get away for not licensing properly with GPL? I mean selling your product without buying the commercial license. How to get yourself caught? Different SLAM solves the same problem anyway.
- singron 9y agoIt sounds like they own the copyright and are dual licensing. However they don't accept contributions (without a copyright assignment) since they wouldn't be able to dual license the contribution.
- discordianfish 9y agoHi, I'm the guy behind latency.at. So far it's really just a little side project. Since few people asked: I mainly open sourced it because I believe it's useful to have a complete, real life service as an example/inspiration.
- stevekemp 9y agoWhich immediately resulted in a bug-report noting that their mailgun API key was committed into code: https://gitlab.com/latency.at/latencyAt/issues/36 https://gitlab.com/latency.at/latencyAt/issues/36 :)