6 ms·

> They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Can you explain what this means? Like - other people copied your work? Genuinely wondering, OSS noob he

by narush 5y ago

> They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Can you explain what this means? Like - other people copied your work? Genuinely wondering, OSS noob here...

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
There was little or nothing in WebRTC to match what we'd spend 5 years creating. So they were back to 1-5 people in a conference, with 1-3 second connect times, and no resilience to network changes. The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP". So they switched to some open source mix node that was the pet project of 2 guys in Italy. Two academics, who gave it hardly any attention. And it had zero IP; just a collection of APIs stitched together to give you the impression of having a mix node. We said all that at the time. But such was the power of the magic words "Open Source" that it all bounced off their mental shields.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  > The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP" But, didn't all this code belong to the company? They could have open sourced it themselves, and it would become an open source solution... What happened to this code??
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Some of the Engineers involved may have some of the components. Tom I know has the desktop client. Chris may have a mix node machine in a closet somewhere :) The backend I'm not so sure. Guy who wrote most of that, is a middle manager at Microsoft. My son wrote some, but he didn't keep any of it.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Sounds like they just wanted to stop paying for developers.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Maybe I'm kinda leaning beyond the practical/relevance limits of "old code still interesting", but could you open-source the implementation you came up with given the passage of time? Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. From an implementational perspective it's also always good to have explicitly bespoke designs out there to contrast against the bog-standardness of WebRTC with its standard "can't be helped" set of limitations and flaws. I also find it very fascinating to hear that OSS was the cause of (headdesk-inducing) myopia and blindsiding. My (naive, distant, apparently out of date) impression was that open-source was incorrectly perceived as the inferior option in the stereotypical case. I guess the entropy pool really can go in all the directions...
  - codethief 5y ago
    > Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. You would think so but why have solutions like Mumble[0], which allows for extremely low-latency and high-quality voice calls and has existed at least since the mid 2000s, not become more popular during the pandemic? Or why didn't people at Zoom and MS Teams at least learn from Mumble? [0]: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/
    - eptcyka 5y ago
      Long enough mumble sessions will desync and the developers don't want to do anything about it. Mobile clients all suck. Mumble is great, but it has flaws too :)
      - codethief 5y ago
        How long are we talking? I remember being in Mumble sessions for hours quite often back in ~2007, 2008 and I never noticed anything like that.
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
  When arrogant MBAs make technology decisions they don't understand and aren't concerned with the details because "their way is best". Sorry to burst their bubble, but most of the tech world operates on a "6 people in Iowa" for niche technologies. It seems often in history that better technologies are lost as the wheel is reinvented for no apparent reason, either due to NIH syndrome, political/business concerns, or out of sheer ignorance. Hubris to the overconfident and a loss for humanity are often the results.

by narush 5y ago

> They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Can you explain what this means? Like - other people copied your work? Genuinely wondering, OSS noob here...

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

There was little or nothing in WebRTC to match what we'd spend 5 years creating. So they were back to 1-5 people in a conference, with 1-3 second connect times, and no resilience to network changes. The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP". So they switched to some open source mix node that was the pet project of 2 guys in Italy. Two academics, who gave it hardly any attention. And it had zero IP; just a collection of APIs stitched together to give you the impression of having a mix node. We said all that at the time. But such was the power of the magic words "Open Source" that it all bounced off their mental shields.

nextaccountic 5y ago
> The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP" But, didn't all this code belong to the company? They could have open sourced it themselves, and it would become an open source solution... What happened to this code??
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Some of the Engineers involved may have some of the components. Tom I know has the desktop client. Chris may have a mix node machine in a closet somewhere :) The backend I'm not so sure. Guy who wrote most of that, is a middle manager at Microsoft. My son wrote some, but he didn't keep any of it.
jandrese 5y ago
Sounds like they just wanted to stop paying for developers.
exikyut 5y ago
Maybe I'm kinda leaning beyond the practical/relevance limits of "old code still interesting", but could you open-source the implementation you came up with given the passage of time? Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. From an implementational perspective it's also always good to have explicitly bespoke designs out there to contrast against the bog-standardness of WebRTC with its standard "can't be helped" set of limitations and flaws. I also find it very fascinating to hear that OSS was the cause of (headdesk-inducing) myopia and blindsiding. My (naive, distant, apparently out of date) impression was that open-source was incorrectly perceived as the inferior option in the stereotypical case. I guess the entropy pool really can go in all the directions...
- codethief 5y ago
  > Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. You would think so but why have solutions like Mumble[0], which allows for extremely low-latency and high-quality voice calls and has existed at least since the mid 2000s, not become more popular during the pandemic? Or why didn't people at Zoom and MS Teams at least learn from Mumble? [0]: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    Long enough mumble sessions will desync and the developers don't want to do anything about it. Mobile clients all suck. Mumble is great, but it has flaws too :)
    - codethief 5y ago
      How long are we talking? I remember being in Mumble sessions for hours quite often back in ~2007, 2008 and I never noticed anything like that.
errcorrectcode 5y ago
When arrogant MBAs make technology decisions they don't understand and aren't concerned with the details because "their way is best". Sorry to burst their bubble, but most of the tech world operates on a "6 people in Iowa" for niche technologies. It seems often in history that better technologies are lost as the wheel is reinvented for no apparent reason, either due to NIH syndrome, political/business concerns, or out of sheer ignorance. Hubris to the overconfident and a loss for humanity are often the results.