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In 2018 I was involved with an NGO that planned on using Polis in their work. They contacted the maintainers who recommended contracting an agency which had exp
by bijant 5y ago
In 2018 I was involved with an NGO that planned on using Polis in their work. They contacted the maintainers who recommended contracting an agency which had experience with Polis as many of the core developers worked there. The NGO did just that, and paid a huge sum for the deployment. The first discussion resulted in a total overload of their servers. The NGOs marketing spent for this project was completely wasted and its reputation tarnished. I was brought in in the aftermath to communicate with the Agency and to scale the deployment. They were unable to scale even to 100s of simultaneous users. We tried to deploy it on our own, only to find out, that the public source code on github did not match the one deployed by the agency. The OpenSource Version on GitHub lagged the version the agency deployed by about a year. Some files critical to deployment were completely missing from the public release. Furthermore the Code was a complete mess. Apparently they never had a successful deployment. The fact that 3 years later in this very thread people are still pointing out that it was used years ago in Taiwan (which was the PoC that convinced the execs at my NGO in 2018) is a testament to that.
If you look at their GitHub (which they don’t promote a lot on their website) they explicitly say:
„ If you'd like to set up your own deployment of Polis, we encourage your to reach out to us for support. We look forward to working together“
This is the real purpose of their project, they try to get consulting gigs for themselves and extract a maximum of money out of unsuspecting NGOs and Govermental Orgs. They have sweet talking sales people but are unable to deliver on their promises. Never Again!
- colinmegill 5y agoFeel free to DM me on twitter if you care to elaborate and want to discuss, this is strange and I'm not sure what you're referring to. The reason we're a registered 501c3 is that the overwhelming majority of the consulting services we provide around the world are done pro bono or at a loss. I'm not sure what provider you're referring to.
- bijant 5y agoThe question is why your consulting services are necessary in the first place. Most Open Source Projects I know can be set up by anyone who is competent in the underlying technology. You explicitly warn people that they will be unable to set it up on their own and that they will need your services. You had years to simplify deployment and haven’t done so. Your Github is still lagging the version that you’re privately deploying. Can You point to logs of any recent deployment that scaled to 100s or 1000s of simultaneous users ? Somewhere else in this thread you claim that OSS software has a competitive advantage in the EU. Is this the reason you pretend that your software is OSS while in practice it is not ?
- colinmegill 5y agoThe software is entirely open source and multiple independent instances exist. Our main deployment at pol.is runs off the same docker containers available to the community. While some time ago, here's an instance that scaled to 30,000+ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yh2yKHUKU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yh2yKHUKU8
- bijant 5y agoWow, this is beyond ridiculous. This is the NGO I was involved with. It did not scale to 30,000 it failed miserably at merely dozens of simultaneous Users. The linked Video is the Exec who took responsibility for ordering Polis trying his best at PR Crisis Management. He was fired shortly afterwards. Apparently You don’t understand German, because in the video he is admitting the technical problems with polis. I‘m just amazed how anyone would point to that video, to tout the supposed strengths of their platform.
- colinmegill 5y agoInteresting! This instance had thousands of concurrent users for a total of 33,000+ and was one of the larger instances of usage of the tech. There was no independent deployment of the technology in this case, so, that is inaccurate.
- bijant 5y agoThe instance failed at mere DOZENS of simultaneous users. Clients kept retrying and then there were thousands of requests of users who were unable to interact with the instance. I went though the logs in detail. It was a clusterfuck.
- patcon 5y agoAs an open source contributor, I submitted the code in 2020 that made it easier to get running with Polis. I find it quite frustrating that you're slandering the project with weird speculations and confusing factual accounts 3 years later, after other people put in the time to improve things. As far as I recall, you never entered a public space (issues, chat) to offer anything, even a formal bug report. I can't understand why you didn't ask for help in the issue queue or chat. I'm sorry if you had a bad time, but your speculations are a funhouse mirror version of what I understood to be the case.