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The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

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Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#41

Post by smacktoward »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
nine_k wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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?

That such independence is - historically at least - usually the opposite. There are very few examples of where post acquisition such independence turned out to be the real deal.

But (as I interpret the blog post, at least) this isn't an acquisition. Cloudflare didn't buy Sandstorm, it just hired all the Sandstorm developers. Those developers still retain ownership of Sandstorm-the-legal-entity and any intellectual property it owns. It's not an acqui-hire, in other words, just a hire.

Which, if that's the case, means that Sandstorm still is legally independent of Cloudflare, and the original Sandstorm devs can pretty much continue to do whatever they want with it. There would be some gray areas, like what will happen to future code or other IP they create for Sandstorm while employed by Cloudflare, or while using Cloudflare systems/resources; and of course their continued employment with Cloudflare may be contingent on their doing things with Sandstorm that Cloudflare likes, or at least doesn't disapprove of too strongly. But if the Sandstorm devs are just selling their future labor and not the company itself, they'll have more independence than they'd have gotten in an acqui-hire scenario.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#42

Post by ryanlol »

kentonv wrote: post #27
devnull42 wrote: post #11

>Although Cloudflare recently suffered from a widely-reported security incident, their response was impressively fast and transparent. Really....seemed like they massively downplayed to me.

FWIW I blogged more about it a couple weeks ago (editorial at the bottom): https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-28-cloudbleed

Your blog post doesn't seem to discuss their response very much.

What leads you to believe that CloudFlare was impressively fast and transparent in this case? Especially since statements from Project Zero seem to imply that they were anything but.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#43

Post by jacquesm »

geofft wrote: post #37
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That such independence is - historically at least - usually the opposite. There are very few examples of where post acquisition such independence turned out to be the real deal.

As far as I can tell, Sandstorm did not get acquired or acquihired - Kenton, Jade, and others (?) as individuals all accepted job offers from Cloudflare.

Ah ok, so the team has joined cloudflare but the corporate entity continues with the original owners.

So in some ways better than an acquihire and in some ways worse.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#44

Post by derefr »

yebyen wrote: post #15
hnbroseph wrote: post #12

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. Gitla…

> Whether that's the Oasis service, your own machines, or something in between.

To clarify: does a "grain" just run in one place, or is each "grain" a cluster of containers that can be spread-scheduled between disparate regions (i.e. "the Oasis service" and "your own machines" at the same time)? And, if the latter, do the cluster nodes have awareness of their locations, and can take advantage of that?

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#45

Post by kentonv »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #36
kentonv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I worked at Google, my favorite weekend activity honestly was working on open source side projects. I'm a workaholic like that. Even while working full-time on Sandstorm, on weekends I'd work on "things I want to code" rather than "things I need to code".

But where do you fit the LAN parties or that FF playthrough? Do you sleep?

LAN parties are every third Saturday. :D

I usually take a week vacation when there's a new FF to play. :P

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#46

Post by kentonv »

smacktoward wrote: post #41
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That such independence is - historically at least - usually the opposite. There are very few examples of where post acquisition such independence turned out to be the real deal.

But (as I interpret the blog post, at least) this isn't an acquisition. Cloudflare didn't buy Sandstorm, it just hired all the Sandstorm developers. Those developers still retain ownership of Sandstorm-the-legal-entity and any intellectual property it owns. It's not an acqui-hire, in other words, just a hire. Which, if that's the case, means that Sandstorm still is legally independent of Cloudflare, and the original…

Correct. The CF people are cool and have no problem with us continuing to operate Sandstorm, as long as we're getting our Cloudflare work done.

Cap'n Proto will presumably end up with mixed copyright, but it's MIT license anyway so who cares?

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#47

Post by kentonv »

ryanlol wrote: post #42
kentonv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I blogged more about it a couple weeks ago (editorial at the bottom): https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-28-cloudbleed

Your blog post doesn't seem to discuss their response very much. What leads you to believe that CloudFlare was impressively fast and transparent in this case? Especially since statements from Project Zero seem to imply that they were anything but.

CF disabled the problematic feature within hours, on a Friday evening. After that, figuring out what private data was stuck in search engine caches was obviously going to take some time. It seems clear enough that they were working as fast as they could. Tavis is awesome but I think he was being unfairly hard on them in the project zero thread.

(Note: All of the above is based on my external observations, as I was not yet an employee nor did I have any internal access at the time.)

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#48

Post by cstrahan »

kentonv wrote: 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'm pretty stoked about future cap'n proto developments. In the scenarios where I've brought up Cap'n Proto, all but the most senior/prolific developers have a near impossible time of ascertaining why one might want to use capnp over competing approaches (e.g. Protobuf). I think, despite a pretty decent description on the website and my own skills in explaining/teaching, such protocols are nearly impossible for the majority of developers to intuit -- so they're all perceived as being nearly identical, save for financial backing and other forms of social proof.

With some of the rough corners filed smooth (e.g. Windows support), a bit more marketing and promotion, and eventually more big names advertising their use of capnp, my job getting buy in from my peers would be much easier.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#49

Post by freehunter »

exabrial wrote: post #8
nilved wrote: post #6

Oh boy. I guess that's it for Sandstorm.

I would much rather use "self hosted" apps like Gitlab, sandstorm, graylog, and the like than SAAS offerings. Your data security and upgrade cycles are in your own hands.

That's part of the reason people use SAAS offerings in the first place. They don't want to have to be responsible for data security and upgrade cycles. These things are hard and when even the professionals get it wrong, what hope does a layman have?

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#50

Post by shawn-butler »

kentonv wrote: post #46
smacktoward wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But (as I interpret the blog post, at least) this isn't an acquisition. Cloudflare didn't buy Sandstorm, it just hired all the Sandstorm developers. Those developers still retain ownership of Sandstorm-the-legal-entity and any intellectual property it owns. It's not an acqui-hire, in other words, just a hire. Which, if that's the case, means that Sandstorm still is legally independent of Cloudflare, and the original…

Correct. The CF people are cool and have no problem with us continuing to operate Sandstorm, as long as we're getting our Cloudflare work done. Cap'n Proto will presumably end up with mixed copyright, but it's MIT license anyway so who cares?

I'm sure you have already but look over that employment contract carefully.

CF being "cool" shouldn't put your project and its users (me!) at risk.

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