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The end of Airplane.dev

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Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#121

Post by codezero »

theturtletalks wrote: post #100
playingalong wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The success is in convincing the investors to give money. The subsequent execution might or might be another success.

Sure, but wouldn’t users be hesitant to use Ravi and Joshua’s products in the future? Businesses depended on Airplane and even paid for the service so having the rug pulled from under them will leave a bad taste.

Airplane was a startup in a competitive market, it wasn't Google Reader shutting down. Anyone using it was an early adopter and in my experience, most early adopters understand the risk. Maybe it's possible that folks will be hesitant, but after multiple successful exits, maybe that's a hypothetical that won't matter any more, often founders move on to be advisors/board members, and I think any board would be lucky to have Ravi's experience on tap.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#122

Post by quickthrower2 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #94
arcanemachiner wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a lot of the open source stuff is runs by companies listed on Crunchbase with millions of dollars of VC backing. That software isn't gonna maintain itself if the cash runs out. Open source may be safer than proprietary software in that regard, but it's still not a guarantee. Still far preferable IMO.

Yes but if you are already self-hosting it, it really isn't hard to keep it alive. It means there will never be a rug-pull with two months notice.

That is true it gives you time to migrate.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#123

Post by gzapp »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #63

Founder of windmill.dev, the open-source alternative mentioned at the end. This market is tough, our customers are both very demanding and hard on price. We are doing very well because we kept the team very small but I cannot imagine the pressure to deliver when having raised 20x what we did. I love what I'm doing and I feel very fortunate for the opportunity to build a startup in a domain that I cherish, devtools, a…

Heya, ex-Rundeck engineer and founder of https://stepwisehq.com .

Will likely end up releasing MVP OSS this month and have to go back to work while continuing to bootstrap. Would love to chat sometime; may be some ideas in here you'd find interesting.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#124

Post by Rapzid »

codezero wrote: post #121
theturtletalks wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but wouldn’t users be hesitant to use Ravi and Joshua’s products in the future? Businesses depended on Airplane and even paid for the service so having the rug pulled from under them will leave a bad taste.

Airplane was a startup in a competitive market, it wasn't Google Reader shutting down. Anyone using it was an early adopter and in my experience, most early adopters understand the risk. Maybe it's possible that folks will be hesitant, but after multiple successful exits, maybe that's a hypothetical that won't matter any more, often founders move on to be advisors/board members, and I think any board would be lucky t…

Such a founder perspective.

Here is another; they fucked over their customers. Didn't even open source it on the way out?! Nobody with a memory for this is going use their products without second thought in the future.

But peoples memories are short and a sucker is born every day.

Would a board be lucky to have Ravi on it? Sure, maybe. So their personal success is secured fuck their users; slow clap.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#125

Post by codezero »

Rapzid wrote: post #124
codezero wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airplane was a startup in a competitive market, it wasn't Google Reader shutting down. Anyone using it was an early adopter and in my experience, most early adopters understand the risk. Maybe it's possible that folks will be hesitant, but after multiple successful exits, maybe that's a hypothetical that won't matter any more, often founders move on to be advisors/board members, and I think any board would be lucky t…

Such a founder perspective. Here is another; they fucked over their customers. Didn't even open source it on the way out?! Nobody with a memory for this is going use their products without second thought in the future. But peoples memories are short and a sucker is born every day. Would a board be lucky to have Ravi on it? Sure, maybe. So their personal success is secured fuck their users; slow clap .

I'm an airplane user, and have already moved our tooling over to retool. Fuck over their customers? I'm sorry, but you have a choice in what tools you acquire, buy, and invest in, if you don't take into account that the company is small, new, and requires VC funding to exist, I just can't empathize with you if you are angry about it not working out. I use new software because it usually gives me access to the team in a way that lets me build with them and get features that a larger incumbent won't provide, but that doesn't mean it will make the company successful, and if they fail it sucks, but it's not like they are actively trying to hurt me.

There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed. I don't know what to tell you, I guess since I've only worked for startups I kind of understand what risks are involved when working with them, but there are also benefits, it's a trade off that you should be making when you're informed.

If you want stability, buy from a profitable and stable company that can pen multi-year contracts that include liability clauses, and if your company has the leverage, get source code/on prem written into your MSA.

All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer clear of emerging technology, you'll feel less betrayed.

*I'm not a founder, never have been a founder, and never could be a founder.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#126

Post by Rapzid »

mgummelt wrote: post #21

One factor that no one seems to have noticed is that both cofounders, Ravi and Joshua, have already built fairly big companies. Ravi was the co-founder at Heap (he took over my co-founder spot after I left), and Joshua was the CTO at Benchling. Both of those companies have raised >$100M. After that success, the prospect of continuing to run a middling company in the shadow of Retool isn't very appealing.

The prospect of screwing over their customers and becoming an also-employee at Airtable is much better? Something isn't quite adding up.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#127

Post by Rapzid »

Something about this narrative doesn't make sense though.

Why would Airtable go through all this trouble just to get a product owner for something unrelated?

Did Airtable even pay anything for Airplane.dev or was this just a face-saving maneuver? I don't understand how the Airtable board would sign-off on this if they are just tossing the tech AND all the users. Outside of those assets, acquihires happen with the aquirer wants the same tech built into their offerings. They are hiring a proven team with existing domain knowledge to reduce the risk of adding this tech. But none of that is happening.

Why not find a way to do right by their customers if Airtable truly isn't interested in the product? Open source it, or find a company willing to take the product and customers on?

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#128

Post by neomantra »

pid-1 wrote: post #106

That's a shame. I really think the world of software infrastructure needs a "more user friendly, batteries included service orchestrator" as an alternative for K8s and public clouds offerings.

Thanks to OP for the candid view. I was confused by Airplane.dev since it seemed like it was taking Temporal and putting SaaS + UX chrome over it. Temporal seemed like the hard part. It also made me wonder why Temporal wasn't doing something end-user friendly in parallel with their Cloud offering. I do enjoy Temporal and have shared my OSS related to it (Terraform modules and a half-baked Terraform Provider).

Regarding that service orchestrator, even before seeing Airplane et al, I've wanted to take my Terraform + Nomad + Temporal + Ops experience (coupled with all the other diverse HPC + UX stuff on my GitHub) and make a nice OSS PaaS out of it.

But I didn't because Nomad is "Business Source Licensed" -- so once I put all that work in and try to make it customer-supported, HashiCorp could shut down any commercial hopes once they finally decide to put Nomad on HCP (why not yet OMG?!). But I get why it's licensed like that, no shade on HashiCorp, any of the big clouds could otherwise host Nomad and crush them.

I much prefer Nomad to K8S for what I do (HPC on-prem + cloud-edge). And HCP itself runs on Temporal!

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#129

Post by Rapzid »

codezero wrote: post #125
Rapzid wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a founder perspective. Here is another; they fucked over their customers. Didn't even open source it on the way out?! Nobody with a memory for this is going use their products without second thought in the future. But peoples memories are short and a sucker is born every day. Would a board be lucky to have Ravi on it? Sure, maybe. So their personal success is secured fuck their users; slow clap .

I'm an airplane user, and have already moved our tooling over to retool. Fuck over their customers? I'm sorry, but you have a choice in what tools you acquire, buy, and invest in, if you don't take into account that the company is small, new, and requires VC funding to exist, I just can't empathize with you if you are angry about it not working out. I use new software because it usually gives me access to the team in…

> Fuck over their customers?

Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that.

> There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed

I'm guessing zero effort was made to continue service for existing customers. If there were efforts made that failed, they would have mentioned it for PR.

> All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer clear of emerging technology, you'll feel less betrayed.

Doesn't change what happened.

> *I'm not a founder, never have been a founder, and never could be a founder.

Apparently you don't need to be to have a founder perspective.

Re: The end of Airplane.dev

#130

Post by codezero »

Rapzid wrote: post #129
codezero wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an airplane user, and have already moved our tooling over to retool. Fuck over their customers? I'm sorry, but you have a choice in what tools you acquire, buy, and invest in, if you don't take into account that the company is small, new, and requires VC funding to exist, I just can't empathize with you if you are angry about it not working out. I use new software because it usually gives me access to the team in…

> Fuck over their customers? Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that. > There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed I'm guessing zero effort was made to continue service for existing customers. If there were efforts made that failed, they would have mentioned it for PR. > All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer cl…

> Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that.

"Fuck over" to me implies malicious intent, if it doesn't to you then that may explain why we have differing points of view.

> Apparently you don't need to be to have a founder perspective.

How many startup founders have you worked closely with in your career when the company they ran was < 50 employees?

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