3 ms·

I always thought Phabricator was closed source. I was completely out of the loop about it closing. Any tldr articles about the whole thing?

IshKebab 4y ago
It's been open source for many years. Not sure if it was ever open source. The twist is that it was developed by a commercial company called Phacility, and their monetisation model was that you had to pay to be able to submit bug reports or even create an account on their Phabricator instance. As a result I don't think they have many external developers. They packed up shop a few months ago. Phorge was created to continue development.
- boltzmann-brain 4y ago
  Wow, that seems like such a genius move at first, but clearly it's really bad.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I dunno, Phabricator is mainly popular in companies (since it's an easy self hosting option) so they're basically selling support. My company paid, and I'm sure they wouldn't have donated anything if they didn't have too. Quite frustrating to not be able to even comment on issues though.
    - aseipp 4y ago
      Yeah, AFAIR the basic realization at some point was that most freely submitted user reports were either of low quality, part of something that wasn't on the near-term roadmap, or part of something to be addressed more broadly in the near term anyway, so the value of them got lower over time. It kind of happens in every FOSS project to some extent; early on in a project's life, user feedback is almost always useful to help hone your direction and future scope, but at a certain point, that value diminishes once you know the contours of what your users want, competitors do, what timeline you can complete them in, etc. Phabricator and its vision were very stable. Evan at some point moved to a support-only model IIRC because he didn't believe the value versus support burden justified the alternative anymore. (And actually, you could still submit bugs and comments generally speaking if you were an "old school" contributor who had generally high-value contributions; I was in this category and never had my permissions pulled, and dropped by from time to time to submit things -- but that was the exception and not the rule.)

IshKebab 4y ago

It's been open source for many years. Not sure if it was ever open source. The twist is that it was developed by a commercial company called Phacility, and their monetisation model was that you had to pay to be able to submit bug reports or even create an account on their Phabricator instance. As a result I don't think they have many external developers. They packed up shop a few months ago. Phorge was created to continue development.

boltzmann-brain 4y ago
Wow, that seems like such a genius move at first, but clearly it's really bad.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I dunno, Phabricator is mainly popular in companies (since it's an easy self hosting option) so they're basically selling support. My company paid, and I'm sure they wouldn't have donated anything if they didn't have too. Quite frustrating to not be able to even comment on issues though.
  - aseipp 4y ago
    Yeah, AFAIR the basic realization at some point was that most freely submitted user reports were either of low quality, part of something that wasn't on the near-term roadmap, or part of something to be addressed more broadly in the near term anyway, so the value of them got lower over time. It kind of happens in every FOSS project to some extent; early on in a project's life, user feedback is almost always useful to help hone your direction and future scope, but at a certain point, that value diminishes once you know the contours of what your users want, competitors do, what timeline you can complete them in, etc. Phabricator and its vision were very stable. Evan at some point moved to a support-only model IIRC because he didn't believe the value versus support burden justified the alternative anymore. (And actually, you could still submit bugs and comments generally speaking if you were an "old school" contributor who had generally high-value contributions; I was in this category and never had my permissions pulled, and dropped by from time to time to submit things -- but that was the exception and not the rule.)