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The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

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Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#151

Post by azakai »

d5tryr wrote: post #114
azakai wrote: post #110

> I paid full price for every version of the Sparrow app I could find. I told everyone who would listen to buy it. I couldn’t have given them more money even if I wanted to. So, as a customer, what more could I have done to keep them running independently? This could have been avoided if their software were open source, or if they committed to open sourcing it should they cease development on it.

How does switching to zero revenue possibly avoid the problem of developers not getting paid enough?

While I agree that there is a problem of getting paid for writing open source software, it is not quite that they all make zero revenue. There are several possible revenue models for open source.

Also, there is the other option I mentioned, that they commit to open sourcing it if they cease development on it. That kind of commitment can make people buying the software safe from having the product discontinued.

Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#152

Post by Teckla »

BasDirks wrote: post #127

After residing in unix-land for almost a year I decided to come back to Mac OSX just 2 days ago, and after re-downloading my purchased apps, the announcement by the Sparrow team was the second mail I picked up. Fuck. Thinking back, in unix-land no such jokes were pulled. Something abandoned? another trooper taking over. How the $#&% can you charge money for something _non-open-source_ and then just leave it to rot? I…

Just a few nitpicks:

"After residing in unix-land for almost a year I decided to come back to Mac OSX..."

OS X is a UNIX. A real, actual UNIX.

"...in unix-land no such jokes were pulled."

I am going to guess you were using Linux, which is not, in fact, a UNIX.

For what it's worth, I spent some time in Linux land. Over the course of a year:

1. One update left my system non-booting. After considerable research, I think I discovered it was a grub/kernel incompatibility.

2. An upgrade left my system non-booting. It was an Ubuntu upgrade from one version to the next, which failed with a mysterious and non-helpful error.

3. Another update caused my external monitor to no longer display the desktop correctly. I was forced to use the 1024x600 display on my netbook instead.

I am now very skeptical of Linux (on the desktop) land. All these issues resulted in a considerable time expense for me.

Now I'm thinking I'm happy to pay $x for operating systems like OS X or Windows...

Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#153

Post by raverbashing »

acdha wrote: post #90
chimi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to blame the app store and focus on Apple here, because Sparrow runs on Apple products, but it's not Apple's fault. Developers have given away software products for less than $0.99 since long before Apple conceived of an app store. Open source software is free. Firefox is free. Thunderbird is free. That anyone would pay for an email client at all is exceptional. It's not Apple who is at fault here -- it's u…

Why? People pay for quality and the OSS email apps tend to be unlovable. Sparrow proved there's a market willing to pay for better clients but Apple doesn't want their money and nobody else seems interested in trying for it.

Yeah, but the market is tiny

A better email client can only go so far:

- Gmail is already a great email client, I just plug other accounts into it

- I really want a good email client. For Linux

- Outlook/Thunderbird/Evolution may be bad, but they're usually good enough

Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#154

Post by DLWormwood »

jusben1369 wrote: post #91
steve8918 wrote: post #60

Unfortunately, this is what you get when you pay $10 for an app. There is a huge disparity when it comes to the cost of apps these days vs the salaries required to sustain the engineers who make those apps. Even at $10/pop, you need to sell a lot of apps just to sustain the salaries of very good engineers, and THIS is what makes great products vulnerable to acqui-hires. The problem is that the $0.99 model of the App…

I don't understand this argument at all. None of it. It's odd and quite frankly silly. It doesn't matter if the app was $10. Enterprise software companies, that sell for 5, 6 and 7 figures get acquired all the time. Their offerings then get EOL'ed many times. Free doesn't help you. $30 doesn't help you. $1 million doesn't help you. If a larger company believes that acquiring smaller company is attractive and writes a…

> When did we all start pining for everything to be the same forever?

Since time immemorial... it’s one of the few constants of human nature that does stay the same.

Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#155

Post by wpietri »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #126
rahoulb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically not difficult. But Sparrow does nothing that any other email client out there does - the great thing about it is its "feel".

Would the "feel" be difficult to reproduce? Maybe someone in a country unhindered by the DMCA could reverse engineering it and find whatever the secret sauce was.

The DMCA isn't a problem; feel is hard to copyright. And if Google now owns the IP, they don't give two shits about suing somebody making a copycat app of something they abandoned.

The problem is that good UI takes an absurd amount of work. It's the difference between painting a wall and painting a mural. With Sparrow to copy you'd have a good start, but you have to be enough of a UI devotee to even notice what makes a UI strong, and you'll still have to do a lot of user testing and polish.

Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#156

Post by mattgreenrocks »

thirdsun wrote: post #109
jiggy2011 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think we have Piracy to thank for this and perhaps to a lesser extent Open Source. There seems to exist a group of people who feel that piracy isn't just something that you do because you can't afford product X and feel marginally guilty about doing but something that is somehow a fundamental human right in a "people who pay for software are mugs" sort of way.

Tell me about it - several of my friends who aren't very tech-savvy would nevertheless go to great lengths in order to have someone jailbreak their iPhones - not to escape the walled garden or other greater reasons, but simply because they heard there's free stuff to get. Of course this isn't limited to software as those are the same people that haven't bought an album in years.

There's something very wrong with people who pay $80/mo for a smartphone contract and don't want to pay $1 for an app.

Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#159

Post by nirvana »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #55
nirvana wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I was an early employee at a startup that was acquired around 1998 for around this amount of money. In those days this wasn't considered an "acquihire" but a "successful exit" or a "base hit". (e.g.: not a failure but not the success that pays for all the other companies in the VC firms cohort that year.) The VCs got about 5X on their money and because of liquidation preferences and other shenanigans, I, and th…

What about the users of your software?

They still complain about its loss... in the years since it has never been replaced. As an employee, I had no choice in the decision.

Re: The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition

#160

Post by bad_user »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #89
rfugger wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sparrow's foundation is imap/smtp...

True, but I expect you use access github through the standard "git commit" , "git pull" type commands. So switching git providers can be done relatively transparently without changing the "UI". Although I guess you would lose whatever extra features github provides, which is partly why I build my git workflow around "standard" git.

GitHub's value is not what you think it is. It goes beyond Git hosting, being a social network for developers and OSS projects. Anybody can setup their own remote git repo on a cheap Linode or EC2 micro instance, but replacing a social network is almost impossible.
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