41–50 of 52 posts
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 (ya…
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Angry much? You lost me with the "code isn't a good that spoils" line. It is a great phrase, but perhaps you could re-explain?
A restaurant requires continuous inputs: fresh food, labor, electricity. Code is a purely digital good. What was in the repo a few days ago could be released at no ongoing cost to FoundationDB/Apple and it will stay exactly how it was, forever.
Essentially, code starts to rot after a while.
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.
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.
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 gracefull…
> Why is this so exceptional? Because code isn't a good that spoils. When someone shuts their door to my favorite restaurant, the presumption is that they were losing money, and needed to close the doors. When my favorite SaaS service shuts down, it's the same deal. This is different. They're just being selfish because they got some money, giving the middle finger to everyone. That same code is still sitting in a git…
It's true that the code that was previously released will forever remain open source but if all the repos get yanked off Github, that does suggest that code is probably not going to be maintained by its new owners. At least not in public.
Code does spoil. Exploits and other critical bugs are found. The only way it remains safe to use is by somebody forking the original project and maintaining. You could do that but most people aren't set up to suddenly take on a major project just to fulfil a dependency.
No argument that this is still a million times better than closed source.
The best thing to do in the short-term is to find a replacement. Even if you don't need it, have something that will work, is maintained and be ready to implement at the drop of a hat.
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.
I much rather have 3 years to migrate away from google's "zombies" than having the rug pulled out from under me overnight.
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.
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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.
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.
This is something you learn after getting burnt by a vendor of $L33T_TOOL_OF_THE_DAY a few times.
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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.
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.
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In theory anyone can, but only large projects tend to get picked up.
But the magic of free software is, if your business depends on it and you can hire someone to work on it, you can keep using that source code for as long as it makes business sense to.