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The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

sandstorm.io

11–20 of 108 posts

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#13
post #5

The people behind Sandstorm are joining Cloudflare and will now have less time to spend on Sandstorm. That's sad, because I was excited in general behind the idea of Sandstorm, and I hope it continues to be worked on, even if it's just during the weekend.

The really big announcement came about six weeks ago, when Kenton announced that Sandstorm for Work was open sourced and not anymore a product that is for sale.

If you didn't follow that link in the first paragraph and didn't hear about it already from some other source, https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-...

IMHO this is all really good news, because people who were on the fence about Sandstorm before can feel more free to commit resources to developing it, without worrying that Sandstorm the company is going to come along and make decisions against their interest, or try to make their work proprietary, or leverage it for the company to make more profit at their expense. (Not that we thought those things would happen...)

They would certainly have less time to work on Sandstorm if they were not able to go right out and get full-time jobs, once it was determined Sandstorm the company was out of money! IMHO there is nothing but good news in these announcements.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#14
post #9

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending t…

> Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself.

Whenever I hear that I'm subvocalizing 'for now'. How do you see this in the longer term?

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#15

cool, but what does sandstorm have to do with cloudflare? then again i don't quite get what it is... some kind of file/app sharing thing.

Sandstorm takes apps that normally would need someone to run a server, breaks them down into the smallest shareable unit (a "grain"), and lets you host them all centrally, on the Sandstorm server. Whether that's the Oasis service, your own machines, or something in between.

So instead of running a whole Gitlab server, you'd run a Sandstorm server that hosts Gitlab grains, each consisting of a single repository. Gitlab itself is no longer responsible for sharing and authentication, the Gitlab grain lets Sandstorm handle that. Apps need to be rewired to fit into this paradigm, but once they do, it feels like one coherent platform rather than a bunch of separate individually hosted apps that maybe you glue together somehow.

For Etherpad, instead of running an Etherpad server that hosts many notepads, you create an Etherpad grain that has just one shared pad. For a drawing app, the grain would be just one drawing. For a photo gallery app, maybe it would be just one gallery. (These are all real examples, these grains all exist and work as I'm describing.)

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#16
post #9

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending t…

I've often found that my motivation to work on something decreases if I'm being paid to do it. Side projects are often much more fun and energizing than your day job. Hope you feel the same!

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#17
post #9

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending t…

Happy to see work on Cap'n Proto continue!

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#18
Sad to here sandstorm.io didn't make it into a viable business for you. I can only imagine just how much energy went into it (and hopefully continues to go).

When time allows, I'd very much appreciate a reflection on the economic viability for innovative infrastructure software in general (hosted vs enterprise sales, also taking RethinkDB's demise and that of other "new stack" startups into account, etc.), and I'm sure others here will as well.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#20
post #9

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending t…

> Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. Whenever I hear that I'm subvocalizing 'for now'. How do you see this in the longer term?

(Isn't everything in our life "for now", given a sufficiently long now?)

What kind of hostile commercial interest there might be, especially when the technology is protected by open-source licenses?

If there were a non-hostile commercial interest, akin to Citus in Postgres, won't it be a win for all?

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