4 ms·

In agreement with what Zed is saying, you would be shocked by the number of companies, YC companies especially, who use Orbited (www.orbited.org) but never ever

by mcmc 16y ago

In agreement with what Zed is saying, you would be shocked by the number of companies, YC companies especially, who use Orbited (www.orbited.org) but never ever mention it, contribute a patch, offer me a job, or really add anything of value to the project. Great, that's their prerogative... its MIT licensed software. But I can tell you, after this sort of interaction for years, I no longer invest my time in Orbited, and instead I bill $250/hr to share my expertise with consumer facing internet startup companies. One actual data point to add this discussion anyway. [ edit for spelling ]

aphexairlines 16y ago
Why did you go with MIT instead of AGPL3? Sure, YC companies wouldn't be using it, but maybe you wouldn't have lost your motivation to keep it going.
- pquerna 16y ago
  speaking of as a YC company who does use orbited (and has contributed back one patch), if it was AGPL, we wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. In orbited's case, it just works for the most part. We don't need help with orbited, we need help in another million areas.
  - bartl 16y ago
    So his problem is, basically, that his software is too good...?
    - pquerna 16y ago
      Yes. It sounds bizarre, but open source software that is not quite good enough builds a much larger community that one where its 'all done'.
    - deskamess 16y ago
      We have a customer who decided to renegotiate our support contract for this reason. They cut a chunk out of our support hours and took away money from the contract when they realized the call volumes were tiny compared with their previous service provider. We had better visibility into their 200+ client sites, automated processes, stability, gave their employees nothing much to do, and, unfortunately (in hindsight), provided good tracking of support incidents. These were the things we were asked to do in the contract, and we did it well, and we paid the price for that. If it was a little more faulty, involved more 'busyness' from the people on their side, and had poor visibility into the overall system we would not have lost that chunk of money. We did not have to be this good, just reasonably better than the old system. Cannot really complain though - from their perspective, this cut was one way to save money. Just business. Funny business.
      - fauigerzigerk 16y ago
        Unfortunately this confirms one of my fears with FOSS. The better the software, the worse the business model works. I hear politicians call for more open source because it creates local support jobs. Software shouldn't create jobs. It should kill jobs so other higher value jobs can be funded somewhere else in the economy.
  - wazoox 16y ago
    > if it was AGPL, we wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. And so you wouldn't participate in the developer's disgust. All positive to me. AGPL FTW.
    - pquerna 16y ago
      No one wanting to touch your software because of a license is FTW how?
      - davidw 16y ago
        For the sake of argument, you could say it's about the right people "touching" your software, especially if you dual license it so that people who don't want the unpleasant AGPL terms pay some money for the benefits they're receiving. After all, cloudkick doesn't seem to mind if some people don't touch it with a ten foot pole because of the price. I think it's a tradeoff: with GPL style licenses, you risk excluding potentially valuable community members who use your code in their own proprietary applications, but may give something back. On the other hand, sometimes those people/companies give nothing back, and some people find that irritating.
  - alextingle 16y ago
    Why not?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
gridspy 16y ago
As one of many users of Orbited. Thankyou. I wish I had time or money to contribute more. I'm hoping to donate to those projects (such as Django, Orbited, Twisted) that are essential Gridspy when we break even. If your curious, I have a simple overview of our backend here: http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors-to-browsers.html http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors...
mcmc 16y ago
Couple of quick responses: pquerna, gridspy, thanks for your responses! I didn't mean to sound quite so cynical. Mainly I am venting my frustration at the lack of a dedicated developer to maintain the project, especially after I've seen so many success stories. wrt AGPL: In orbited's case -- b/c it is a socket proxy -- the AGPL would really have no impact whatsoever on users. No one would be linking any of their code in-process, and so there would really be no requirement for them to AGPL any of their custom back-end logic. Besides, I don't really believe in trying to force users down a particular path. My hope is always that freedom and choice helps build trust with your user base, which ultimately results in the healthiest community. Yet, when I started Orbited 3-4 years ago, I never intended to be married to the project forever. My hope has always been that some people/projects/companies that are depending on the Orbited would be willing to commit substantial engineering resources to fix bugs and implement new features, and from those contributions some new core committers would emerge. Unfortunately, my work still accounts for about 95% of the 0.7.x branch which is the last stable release. I feel like Orbited is far behind, considering I haven't been involved in a release in about 2 years, and no one else has really stepped up. I am always shocked, truthfully, when I hear success stories and see people building applications with it still. The code base has remained unchanged through about 10 browser releases.
- gridspy 16y ago
  Yes, I noticed this inactivity when I started working with Orbited. However, I always assumed you had reached a natural conclusion and stopped.

by mcmc 16y ago

aphexairlines 16y ago

Why did you go with MIT instead of AGPL3? Sure, YC companies wouldn't be using it, but maybe you wouldn't have lost your motivation to keep it going.

pquerna 16y ago
speaking of as a YC company who does use orbited (and has contributed back one patch), if it was AGPL, we wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. In orbited's case, it just works for the most part. We don't need help with orbited, we need help in another million areas.
- bartl 16y ago
  So his problem is, basically, that his software is too good...?
  - pquerna 16y ago
    Yes. It sounds bizarre, but open source software that is not quite good enough builds a much larger community that one where its 'all done'.
  - deskamess 16y ago
    We have a customer who decided to renegotiate our support contract for this reason. They cut a chunk out of our support hours and took away money from the contract when they realized the call volumes were tiny compared with their previous service provider. We had better visibility into their 200+ client sites, automated processes, stability, gave their employees nothing much to do, and, unfortunately (in hindsight), provided good tracking of support incidents. These were the things we were asked to do in the contract, and we did it well, and we paid the price for that. If it was a little more faulty, involved more 'busyness' from the people on their side, and had poor visibility into the overall system we would not have lost that chunk of money. We did not have to be this good, just reasonably better than the old system. Cannot really complain though - from their perspective, this cut was one way to save money. Just business. Funny business.
    - fauigerzigerk 16y ago
      Unfortunately this confirms one of my fears with FOSS. The better the software, the worse the business model works. I hear politicians call for more open source because it creates local support jobs. Software shouldn't create jobs. It should kill jobs so other higher value jobs can be funded somewhere else in the economy.
- wazoox 16y ago
  > if it was AGPL, we wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. And so you wouldn't participate in the developer's disgust. All positive to me. AGPL FTW.
  - pquerna 16y ago
    No one wanting to touch your software because of a license is FTW how?
    - davidw 16y ago
      For the sake of argument, you could say it's about the right people "touching" your software, especially if you dual license it so that people who don't want the unpleasant AGPL terms pay some money for the benefits they're receiving. After all, cloudkick doesn't seem to mind if some people don't touch it with a ten foot pole because of the price. I think it's a tradeoff: with GPL style licenses, you risk excluding potentially valuable community members who use your code in their own proprietary applications, but may give something back. On the other hand, sometimes those people/companies give nothing back, and some people find that irritating.
- alextingle 16y ago
  Why not?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

gridspy 16y ago

As one of many users of Orbited. Thankyou. I wish I had time or money to contribute more. I'm hoping to donate to those projects (such as Django, Orbited, Twisted) that are essential Gridspy when we break even. If your curious, I have a simple overview of our backend here: http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors-to-browsers.html http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors...

mcmc 16y ago

Couple of quick responses: pquerna, gridspy, thanks for your responses! I didn't mean to sound quite so cynical. Mainly I am venting my frustration at the lack of a dedicated developer to maintain the project, especially after I've seen so many success stories. wrt AGPL: In orbited's case -- b/c it is a socket proxy -- the AGPL would really have no impact whatsoever on users. No one would be linking any of their code in-process, and so there would really be no requirement for them to AGPL any of their custom back-end logic. Besides, I don't really believe in trying to force users down a particular path. My hope is always that freedom and choice helps build trust with your user base, which ultimately results in the healthiest community. Yet, when I started Orbited 3-4 years ago, I never intended to be married to the project forever. My hope has always been that some people/projects/companies that are depending on the Orbited would be willing to commit substantial engineering resources to fix bugs and implement new features, and from those contributions some new core committers would emerge. Unfortunately, my work still accounts for about 95% of the 0.7.x branch which is the last stable release. I feel like Orbited is far behind, considering I haven't been involved in a release in about 2 years, and no one else has really stepped up. I am always shocked, truthfully, when I hear success stories and see people building applications with it still. The code base has remained unchanged through about 10 browser releases.

gridspy 16y ago
Yes, I noticed this inactivity when I started working with Orbited. However, I always assumed you had reached a natural conclusion and stopped.