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A Sad Announcement

omniref.com

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Re: A Sad Announcement

#11

Post by dceddia »

gravypod wrote: post #10
jzelinskie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why you see startups avoiding this model is because supporting self hosted solutions is extremely difficult as a small team and only impedes the ability to evolve your product. It's a shame, but companies shouldn't adopt products if they lack a feature requirement (data migration).

This is only the case for complicated deployment proceedures. One of my favorite pieces of software that I love updating is a project called GitBucket. It's a GitHub/BitBucket-esq site. It's simple to host and easy to use without much overhead. The deployment procedures go as follow: 1. Install JVM 8 2. Install GIT 3. Run If you aren't running a database it defaults to the internal one. All the defaults are sane. It…

I think part of the problem is that for every person like you (competent DIY'er) there are N people who don't really know how to do those 3 steps, but for whatever reason (budget, fear of SaaS, etc) decide to host the thing in-house. Those are the ones that become a support nightmare.

I get the feeling that the number of not-so-competent DIY'ers far outweighs the competent ones.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#12

Post by timr »

gravypod wrote: post #7

This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control. I feel really bad for all the companies that have to jump through hoops to get their data rescued from this company. It also sucks to loose such a smart company. I wish they had built their solutions as a self hosted system so that people could still us…

"This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control."

Omniref founder here. Please try not to think this way, particularly if you're a small team. I realize that this is kind of an impossible request (especially given the source), but one of the things that makes it immensely difficult to start a software tools company is the unwillingness of developers to use hosted tools, particularly if those tools are new and/or different.

When you're a small team, you can only do so many things at once. Supporting hosted users, even in the best-case scenario, takes a lot of time and effort. It's (sometimes) worth it if you can land bigger clients who are willing to pay a premium for that effort, but often those bigger clients won't pay until you have a reputation with smaller teams, or they require lots of custom development that takes even more of your time. So you have a chicken-and-egg problem. It's not impossible to make it work, but it's harder than it should be.

If you're running a small/medium team, try to realize that innovation can only exist in this area if we're willing to support startups when they're younger. I've personally used lots of startups' services over the years for my dev work. Some succeeded, others failed, but trust has never been an issue.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#13

Post by timr »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

This is sad, and a bit perplexing. According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity ) and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last couple of years and add their biological distin…

Hi. Founder here.

I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite, actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style, "why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this sort of stuff.

The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they usually come with...terms. Which may or may not be good. There's also no guarantee that an acquired product will continue to exist post-acquisition.

Anyway, if enough people are interested, we're considering open-sourcing the annotation tool. I'd like to see that live on.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#14

Post by timr »

nemild wrote: post #3

I'm sorry to hear the news - code annotation is something we need more of, especially for teaching and debating different design choices. I remember your posts on how MRI/Ruby worked from a few years back, which were always fun - and something that I thought other open source projects would have benefited from.

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#15

Post by MaxLeiter »

timr wrote: post #13
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

This is sad, and a bit perplexing. According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity ) and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last couple of years and add their biological distin…

Hi. Founder here. I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite, actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style, "why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this sort of stuff. The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they usually come…

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#16

Post by timr »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #15
timr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Founder here. I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite, actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style, "why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this sort of stuff. The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they usually come…

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down.

If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#17

Post by nebabyte »

timr wrote: post #16
MaxLeiter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

> They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually

Not necessarily - just mention that the project is abandonware/looking for a new maintainer. Having access to the code will be helpful to anyone looking to move forward or build on it without tying you down, and anyone who finds a workable model can benefit from your fork.

Re: A Sad Announcement

#18

Post by hashhar »

timr wrote: post #16
MaxLeiter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.

Open-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.

I agree. It has started to kind of happen to OpenLiveWriter [1].

[1]: https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter/

Re: A Sad Announcement

#20

Post by dkarapetyan »

I posted this because I needed a code annotation tool to help me understand some C code and I remembered Omniref. I'm sad to see it disappear like this. I hope they will open source the annotations so that others can host it.

My use case isn't anything fancy. I just want to understand what tail is doing behind the scenes with inotify so that I can implement it in another language but I haven't found a rigorous enough outline of tail in pseudo-code to translate it. So now I'm just fighting with it in Vim and VSCode to strip away all the baggage that C forces onto a problem to get to the meat of the actual solution.

I think we all gain when code is more understandable and don't have to individually reverse engineer things to transport the lessons from one code base into another. I thought crowd sourcing the annotation process was an interesting take by Omniref. Maybe it was ahead of its time.

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