6 ms·

What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On

74 points by rosser 12y ago

davidgerard 12y ago
OPEN SOURCE, dudes. Protection from your vendor is why you need it. This is something you learn after getting burnt by a vendor of $L33T_TOOL_OF_THE_DAY a few times.
ademarre 12y ago
The article cites CouchDB as how this kind of thing can play out differently for open-source software. The first example that came to my mind was Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and the subsequent MySQL forks (e.g. MariaDB). Of course, we still have MySQL today, and AFAIK it remains to be seen what will happen to FoundationDB. I doubt Apple will kill it.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Same thing happened with the 13th Lab pointcloud SDK getting sucked into Oculus. We also see it with developers getting sucked into Google/FB etc...
joe_the_user 12y ago
De rigueur comment: What happens when Apple buys a closed source company you depend on.
pmorici 12y ago
Were these people paying customers? If not what did they expect would happen.
- freehunter 12y ago
  To combine this with another comment, free and closed source means that at some point, many of those users will be massively disappointed. I can think of very few exceptions.
  - meric 12y ago
    Google search engine is free and closed source? Sure, some of us are disappointed with how our search data is treated, but the disappointment for most generally ends at incognito mode, not that close to 'massive'. That's quite a big exception.
    - pmorici 12y ago
      Everyone know how Google makes money though, through ads. A database company doesn't have that option.
    - freehunter 12y ago
      Even if it were true that Google doesn't have a business model, that's still only one exception.
bobbles 12y ago
The website doesn't even mention anything relating to the purchase from what I can see https://foundationdb.com/ https://foundationdb.com/ Edit: Ah.. its on the community page: http://community.foundationdb.com/ http://community.foundationdb.com/
pje 12y ago
> Like other NoSQL databases, FoundationDB offered a way to build databases that spanned hundreds or thousands of different servers, often housed in geographically distant data centers. What? > FoundationDB promised a way to provide scalability without sacrificing performance Wait, what?
- fineline 12y ago
  I understand that FoundationDB's main point of differentiation from other NoSQL document DBs was support for transactional integrity across documents. Others (i.e. all open-source options, AFAIK) support atomic transactions only on a single document. Sounds like the author had been told this, didn't quite get it, and mumbled this stuff instead.
S_A_P 12y ago
It's odd that they imply foundation db has a strength in scalable performance that other no sql databases do not which would be handy for financial applications but then fail to mention apple pay as a potential use case.
Alex3917 12y ago
If Apple gets any bigger we're going to have to start worrying about them buying Google and then shutting it down.
- taspeotis 12y ago
  I imagine it's impossible in practice, but it's fun to entertain theoretically. Right now it seems GOOG has a market cap of $383.11B and Apple has $178B on hand [1]. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-cash-178-billion/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-cash-178-bil...
  - meric 12y ago
    Google has $60b cash. Apple can borrow $205b, buy Google for $383b, use Google's $60b cash to pay off the debt, with Apple ending up owing $145b. It's not too unreasonable for a $718.66b company to be $145b in debt. Alternatively, use a script and cash offer. Pay $178b in cash and the rest in shares. All of this is possible, but as Page & Brin own 56% of voting power so all Apple would be getting is Google's income, but have no say to its decision making process. I assume Page & Brin aren't selling. Not really worth it for an extra $16b per year.
    - smitherfield 12y ago
      Pretty sure the FTC would not approve that merger, since it would give Apple a monopoly on mobile device operating systems, and arguably "tech" in general.
  - Mikeb85 12y ago
    Not to mention, to buy out Google, they'd need to offer at least 20% above the market price (probably even more).
mc32 12y ago
The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefully, but it does not happen all the time. What are they saying in essence? Don't depend on closed source services? Don't depend on non-creative commons Wired articles for your news as they may shut down one day? People make a calculus. This option is closed source, but offers this advantage. I know, as any business, they may disappear and I'm left holding the bag, but I'm willing to take that chance, given the advantages. This is also the case for open source software, but, yes, OSS has the advantage that someone with sufficient need and resources could resurrect the project. Fine, they have a preference for open source. That's great. We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.
- saganus 12y ago
  > We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow. And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well. So in essence we as humans would probably be better off expecting things to disappear instead of the opposite maybe? Not sure I can do that, but still, seems like a more fitting strategy.
  - jasonlotito 12y ago
    > And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well. I can continue improving an open source project that gets abandoned.
    - mc32 12y ago
      In theory anyone can, but only large projects tend to get picked up.
Handwash 12y ago
Despite the fact that this is not only happen in Apple specific case as the title suggest and probably, a quite generalization of what Apple do to the company it bought, the article raises a good point to carefully decide what technology solution you use for your company. We have to expect that any product that we used might come to an end someday, and need to make sure that we at least have an escape plan for that.
spectrum1234 12y ago
"That leaves companies that depended on that software out of luck. And when startups suffer, so does innovation." Uhhh except that their existence outright is in itself innovation. Removing their existence cannot reduce innovation since their initial existence furthered it. cliffs: article is dumb and author is an idiot. at least i think, i had to stop reading the article.
- geofft 12y ago
  ... it reduces future innovation, it doesn't undo past innovation.
awinder 12y ago
If this acquisition was in any way related to Apple wanting to use this product in-house -- call me massively confused. It really would be a mental sickness if Apple were so insistent on using closed-source tech across the organization, even while that is a very obscure line of thinking amongst it's competitors in the cloud space. On the other hand, if Apple is acqui-hiring these guys -- then why kill the download links instantly? So yeah, either way, seems like a poorly handled situation
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- capkutay 12y ago
  Just because the tech companies we read about on hacker news rely on and contribute to open source, doesn't mean that its a 'mental sickness' to use proprietary products. There's good workloads for open source (Apple uses hadoop/hbase heavily internally), and then theres unique proprietary solutions.
  - awinder 12y ago
    The mental sickness wouldn't be using any proprietary software. The mental sickness would be acquiring a closed source database and keeping the tech closed source. Databases specifically seem to have a huge mindshare and usage share around open source. And when conventional stores haven't fulfilled a need, solutions like Cassandra, CouchBase, and Mongodb have been released as open source software. I don't really think Apple has some unique data persistence needs to require such an obscure path, if that is really what they were doing
grrowl 12y ago
"We have made the decision to evolve our company mission and, as of today, we will no longer offer downloads." is the least respectful and most opaque phrase I've ever heard. What would have been the risk of something more honest and direct?
- mik3y 12y ago
  Seriously. This is beyond crass. Not 2 months ago, I came this close to betting on and recommending FoundationDB. Today I would have been swimming in a world of shit (not to mention wasted time) had I recommended these guys. I'm never one to begrudge exits, but they blew this. Even if financial circumstances meant they had to turn down the product, there are way better ways to do that before yanking everything and disappearing. Dave Scherer, Dave Rosenthal: I hope you're stocking up for a long cozy retirement at Apple. I honestly don't know how you expect to be trusted by a faithful early adopter ever again.
- mb_72 12y ago
  Indeed - this reads as "we no longer need you, the customer, so screw you". Not a good look for anyone who is looking to move on from this company, especially if they are in management and presumably would have had something to say about how things wound down.
nitrogen 12y ago
I'd still like to know what Apple is going to do with PrimeSense. Thanks to that purchase, I have to rely on used Kinects for all of my depth sensing needs.
mindcrash 12y ago
Maybe something more is at play here than just the founders and team cutting access to years of their work. Could also be something to do with a certain company who doesn't like you to have access to (certain) assets of their acquisition after it went through. I mean, they did the same thing with TestFlight. janking Android support directly after the acquisition (and closing it altogether a while later) and Logic (yanking Windows support directly after the acquisition and making the product OSX exclusive). You could say Apple really is quite ruthless and basically acts like a asshole when it comes to acquisitions, even though their CEO seems to be quite a nice and gentle person (at least after work hours)
- santosha 12y ago
  Let's not forget Siri.
makeitsuckless 12y ago
At least Apple makes puts it out of its misery quickly, unlike the likes of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, who have been known to let products of acquired companies live on like zombies before finally "sunsetting" them. How often haven't we read the whole fake happy "we're so excited, but nothing will change" press releases? Those have become a running joke.
- ido 12y ago
  I much rather have 3 years to migrate away from google's "zombies" than having the rug pulled out from under me overnight.
  - yaeger 12y ago
    Uh, how is this different? These zombies most likely will also offer no support or security patches. Hence the term "zombie". The only difference here would be that you could possibly still download the last version from their site which is not the case with FoundationDB. As long as you have the latest version and you put it in your SCM or wherever you want to keep these things, you are just as able to take 3 years to migrate away from FoundationDB as you would be from one of these zombies. At least with FoundationDB, as others have said, you actually know now what will happen in the future, with the zombie you might spend additional time "sticking it out" before you realize they will stay dead. That would be time you could have used to start the migration.

74 points by rosser 12y ago

OPEN SOURCE, dudes. Protection from your vendor is why you need it. This is something you learn after getting burnt by a vendor of $L33T_TOOL_OF_THE_DAY a few times.

ademarre 12y ago

The article cites CouchDB as how this kind of thing can play out differently for open-source software. The first example that came to my mind was Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and the subsequent MySQL forks (e.g. MariaDB). Of course, we still have MySQL today, and AFAIK it remains to be seen what will happen to FoundationDB. I doubt Apple will kill it.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

Same thing happened with the 13th Lab pointcloud SDK getting sucked into Oculus. We also see it with developers getting sucked into Google/FB etc...

joe_the_user 12y ago

De rigueur comment: What happens when Apple buys a closed source company you depend on.

pmorici 12y ago

Were these people paying customers? If not what did they expect would happen.

freehunter 12y ago
To combine this with another comment, free and closed source means that at some point, many of those users will be massively disappointed. I can think of very few exceptions.
- meric 12y ago
  Google search engine is free and closed source? Sure, some of us are disappointed with how our search data is treated, but the disappointment for most generally ends at incognito mode, not that close to 'massive'. That's quite a big exception.
  - pmorici 12y ago
    Everyone know how Google makes money though, through ads. A database company doesn't have that option.
  - freehunter 12y ago
    Even if it were true that Google doesn't have a business model, that's still only one exception.

bobbles 12y ago

The website doesn't even mention anything relating to the purchase from what I can see https://foundationdb.com/ https://foundationdb.com/ Edit: Ah.. its on the community page: http://community.foundationdb.com/ http://community.foundationdb.com/

pje 12y ago

> Like other NoSQL databases, FoundationDB offered a way to build databases that spanned hundreds or thousands of different servers, often housed in geographically distant data centers. What? > FoundationDB promised a way to provide scalability without sacrificing performance Wait, what?

fineline 12y ago
I understand that FoundationDB's main point of differentiation from other NoSQL document DBs was support for transactional integrity across documents. Others (i.e. all open-source options, AFAIK) support atomic transactions only on a single document. Sounds like the author had been told this, didn't quite get it, and mumbled this stuff instead.

S_A_P 12y ago

It's odd that they imply foundation db has a strength in scalable performance that other no sql databases do not which would be handy for financial applications but then fail to mention apple pay as a potential use case.

Alex3917 12y ago

If Apple gets any bigger we're going to have to start worrying about them buying Google and then shutting it down.

taspeotis 12y ago
I imagine it's impossible in practice, but it's fun to entertain theoretically. Right now it seems GOOG has a market cap of $383.11B and Apple has $178B on hand [1]. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-cash-178-billion/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-cash-178-bil...
- meric 12y ago
  Google has $60b cash. Apple can borrow $205b, buy Google for $383b, use Google's $60b cash to pay off the debt, with Apple ending up owing $145b. It's not too unreasonable for a $718.66b company to be $145b in debt. Alternatively, use a script and cash offer. Pay $178b in cash and the rest in shares. All of this is possible, but as Page & Brin own 56% of voting power so all Apple would be getting is Google's income, but have no say to its decision making process. I assume Page & Brin aren't selling. Not really worth it for an extra $16b per year.
  - smitherfield 12y ago
    Pretty sure the FTC would not approve that merger, since it would give Apple a monopoly on mobile device operating systems, and arguably "tech" in general.
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  Not to mention, to buy out Google, they'd need to offer at least 20% above the market price (probably even more).

mc32 12y ago

The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out. Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack. I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefully, but it does not happen all the time. What are they saying in essence? Don't depend on closed source services? Don't depend on non-creative commons Wired articles for your news as they may shut down one day? People make a calculus. This option is closed source, but offers this advantage. I know, as any business, they may disappear and I'm left holding the bag, but I'm willing to take that chance, given the advantages. This is also the case for open source software, but, yes, OSS has the advantage that someone with sufficient need and resources could resurrect the project. Fine, they have a preference for open source. That's great. We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.

saganus 12y ago
> We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow. And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well. So in essence we as humans would probably be better off expecting things to disappear instead of the opposite maybe? Not sure I can do that, but still, seems like a more fitting strategy.
- jasonlotito 12y ago
  > And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well. I can continue improving an open source project that gets abandoned.
  - mc32 12y ago
    In theory anyone can, but only large projects tend to get picked up.

Handwash 12y ago

Despite the fact that this is not only happen in Apple specific case as the title suggest and probably, a quite generalization of what Apple do to the company it bought, the article raises a good point to carefully decide what technology solution you use for your company. We have to expect that any product that we used might come to an end someday, and need to make sure that we at least have an escape plan for that.

spectrum1234 12y ago

"That leaves companies that depended on that software out of luck. And when startups suffer, so does innovation." Uhhh except that their existence outright is in itself innovation. Removing their existence cannot reduce innovation since their initial existence furthered it. cliffs: article is dumb and author is an idiot. at least i think, i had to stop reading the article.

geofft 12y ago
... it reduces future innovation, it doesn't undo past innovation.

awinder 12y ago

If this acquisition was in any way related to Apple wanting to use this product in-house -- call me massively confused. It really would be a mental sickness if Apple were so insistent on using closed-source tech across the organization, even while that is a very obscure line of thinking amongst it's competitors in the cloud space. On the other hand, if Apple is acqui-hiring these guys -- then why kill the download links instantly? So yeah, either way, seems like a poorly handled situation

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
capkutay 12y ago
Just because the tech companies we read about on hacker news rely on and contribute to open source, doesn't mean that its a 'mental sickness' to use proprietary products. There's good workloads for open source (Apple uses hadoop/hbase heavily internally), and then theres unique proprietary solutions.
- awinder 12y ago
  The mental sickness wouldn't be using any proprietary software. The mental sickness would be acquiring a closed source database and keeping the tech closed source. Databases specifically seem to have a huge mindshare and usage share around open source. And when conventional stores haven't fulfilled a need, solutions like Cassandra, CouchBase, and Mongodb have been released as open source software. I don't really think Apple has some unique data persistence needs to require such an obscure path, if that is really what they were doing

grrowl 12y ago

"We have made the decision to evolve our company mission and, as of today, we will no longer offer downloads." is the least respectful and most opaque phrase I've ever heard. What would have been the risk of something more honest and direct?

mik3y 12y ago
Seriously. This is beyond crass. Not 2 months ago, I came this close to betting on and recommending FoundationDB. Today I would have been swimming in a world of shit (not to mention wasted time) had I recommended these guys. I'm never one to begrudge exits, but they blew this. Even if financial circumstances meant they had to turn down the product, there are way better ways to do that before yanking everything and disappearing. Dave Scherer, Dave Rosenthal: I hope you're stocking up for a long cozy retirement at Apple. I honestly don't know how you expect to be trusted by a faithful early adopter ever again.
mb_72 12y ago
Indeed - this reads as "we no longer need you, the customer, so screw you". Not a good look for anyone who is looking to move on from this company, especially if they are in management and presumably would have had something to say about how things wound down.

nitrogen 12y ago

I'd still like to know what Apple is going to do with PrimeSense. Thanks to that purchase, I have to rely on used Kinects for all of my depth sensing needs.

mindcrash 12y ago

Maybe something more is at play here than just the founders and team cutting access to years of their work. Could also be something to do with a certain company who doesn't like you to have access to (certain) assets of their acquisition after it went through. I mean, they did the same thing with TestFlight. janking Android support directly after the acquisition (and closing it altogether a while later) and Logic (yanking Windows support directly after the acquisition and making the product OSX exclusive). You could say Apple really is quite ruthless and basically acts like a asshole when it comes to acquisitions, even though their CEO seems to be quite a nice and gentle person (at least after work hours)

santosha 12y ago
Let's not forget Siri.

makeitsuckless 12y ago

At least Apple makes puts it out of its misery quickly, unlike the likes of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, who have been known to let products of acquired companies live on like zombies before finally "sunsetting" them. How often haven't we read the whole fake happy "we're so excited, but nothing will change" press releases? Those have become a running joke.

ido 12y ago
I much rather have 3 years to migrate away from google's "zombies" than having the rug pulled out from under me overnight.
- yaeger 12y ago
  Uh, how is this different? These zombies most likely will also offer no support or security patches. Hence the term "zombie". The only difference here would be that you could possibly still download the last version from their site which is not the case with FoundationDB. As long as you have the latest version and you put it in your SCM or wherever you want to keep these things, you are just as able to take 3 years to migrate away from FoundationDB as you would be from one of these zombies. At least with FoundationDB, as others have said, you actually know now what will happen in the future, with the zombie you might spend additional time "sticking it out" before you realize they will stay dead. That would be time you could have used to start the migration.