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They should, but probably wont. If you sell a service, but decide not to provide it you should refund the money. Judging from the comments most of HN assumes i
by howeyc 14y ago
They should, but probably wont.
If you sell a service, but decide not to provide it you should refund the money. Judging from the comments most of HN assumes if you "attempt" to provide the service you can keep the money.
Yes, I get it's a losing proposition for Joyent to live up to their obligations. So what? You either live up to them, or refund the money, it's really that simple.
- mikeash 14y agoYeah, the comments seem to be filled with people saying that it's not practical to provide "lifetime", and people buying it should have known they didn't mean it anyway. I look at this the same way I look at "unlimited" internet service. Unlike a lot of the tech crowd, I have no problem whatsoever with metered bandwidth. My only quibble is that if you advertise "unlimited" you had better actually provide unlimited. If you want to charge for overages or enact caps, you don't get to call it "unlimited".
- smackfu 14y agoPersonally, I think it's much more likely any random internet companie's life is a lot shorter than my own.
- wpietri 14y agoYeah, the comments seem to be filled with people saying that it's not practical to provide "lifetime", and people buying it should have known they didn't mean it anyway. And that fascinates me. There's a clear information asymmetry here, and therefore a clear power differential. But so many people are instantly willing to blame the weaker party for being trusting, rather than blaming the stronger party for abusing their customers. Of course, they're only doing that after it blows up. None of them are saying, "Stop using Hacker News! There's no revenue model, so it will all end in tears! Quit now!"
- mikeash 14y agoIt's an interesting question. If I make a promise I know I can't fulfill, and you know I can't fulfill, is it still a promise? Is there a breach of trust when I end up not being able to fulfill it? I'd say that yes, it's still a promise and a breach of trust even if everybody knows I don't really mean it. But I don't think there's a single obvious answer.
- wpietri 14y agoIf you know you can't fulfill it then I believe it's all on you, in that you're lying. Some fraction of people will believe you, and even those that don't can't know you can't fulfill it. There are plenty of legitimate life-of-the-company deals. One of them is buying stock. And there are plenty of companies that offer lifetime warranties. Only the person offering the deal has the information to know that they can't honor it. And in this case, Joyent can honor it; it's not like keeping these servers running would put them out of business. They just don't want to honor it, so anybody who took this deal is so far correct in thinking that Joyent made a promise that they could fulfill.
- jacques_chester 14y agoSome customers don't want a refund. They want Joyent to perform its half of the contract.
- mikeash 14y agoYes, but slavery is illegal.
- jacques_chester 14y agoWhere do you get the idea that asking someone to uphold their end of a contract is equivalent to owning a human being?
- mikeash 14y agoAsking them to do it is fine, but you can't obligate them to do it. A contract can never force you to perform work, because that is slavery. It can force you to perform work or suffer some kind of penalty. In this case, I think the appropriate penalty is a full refund for all of the affected customers.
- jacques_chester 14y agoAre you a lawyer? I'm not, though I studied law for a while. What you say may be true of common law. But I suspect the doctrines of equity may have other ideas. The return of funds is not the same as lifetime hosting. Those clients want specific performance and equity may yet grant it to them.
- mikeash 14y agoNo, I'm not. And yes, the clients want specific performance, but do they have the right to get it? Seems like at most, the clients would be entitled to a refund plus whatever damages they could show (e.g. the cost of switching to a different service, plus any losses they take from other arrangements they made based on the promise of lifetime service). Could a court really order Joyent to keep providing this service against their will? Seems like restitution would be it.