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FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

blog.fastmail.fm

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Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#81

Post by networked »

andybak wrote: post #66
hotwatermusic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From this presentation ( http://vimeo.com/73934576 ): Presto don't go open source in the foreseeable future, cause Opera don't want to lose support contracts for the TV browsers. That's makes sense.

Would it not be possible to add some terms to the licence to protect that revenue stream in some way?

Restricting commercial use would disqualify it from being "open source" according to the OSI's definition [1]. If you changed the text of the GNU GPL, the license proposed by the GGP, you would also no longer be able to call it the GPL since the text of the license itself is copyrighted and not free to edit (to, e.g., prevent fragmentation) [2]. If you did all that the source release could well be a net negative for whatever goodwill the FOSS community has for your company.

What they could do instead is dual-license it under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL 3.0 and a proprietary license betting on companies being reluctant to share their source code. Still, it would hardly be to their advantage at all.

[1] http://opensource.org/osd-annotated

[2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL.

Edit: clarified how the GPL can be changed.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#82

Post by da_n »

josteink wrote: post #67
coffeecheque wrote: post #11

I'm a big fan of Fastmail, and I'm tentatively excited about this announcement. Missing CardDAV/CalDav sync ability is sorely missing, so it's good to see the developers talking about it. I'd also like to see (and would pay for) options where the data is located in other countries, away from the United States. It's really symbolic, but also practical: I'd like my data closer to where I live.

Seconding this. Currently I'm fine having that live in owncloud, but should fastmail start supporting it, I may want to sync these data-sets. Not sure I want to move everything into one place and one place only though. If it was one thing my migration from Google Apps taught me, it was that having too much stuff auto-integrated in one place makes it much harder to have control of your own data. It severely limits you…

How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data at random which would be unacceptable to me. I am using Baikal for CardDav and CalDav which has been very reliable so far, and BitTorrent Sync for Dropbox replacement which is less reliable and has some bad bugs (one of which is it being closed source).

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#83

Post by [deleted] »

drill_sarge wrote: post #74

I wonder what "strategic changes" they did at Opera? So far they have shut down all their interesting projects (like Opera Unite), their browser has been highly customizable (the UI, not even needing addons) which was abandoned completely in Opera 15. Now they have some half-assed Chrome clone for Desktop, Coast browser which is also nowhere near final, Opera Mobile (not mini) is getting more and more generic like al…

[deleted]

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#84

Post by josteink »

da_n wrote: post #82
josteink wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. Currently I'm fine having that live in owncloud, but should fastmail start supporting it, I may want to sync these data-sets. Not sure I want to move everything into one place and one place only though. If it was one thing my migration from Google Apps taught me, it was that having too much stuff auto-integrated in one place makes it much harder to have control of your own data. It severely limits you…

How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data at random which would be unacceptable to me. I am using Baikal for CardDav and CalDav which has been very reliable so far, and BitTorrent Sync for Dropbox replacement which is less reliable and has some bad bugs (one of which is it being closed source).

How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data

Good question.

I have mixed impressions of owncloud so far depending on what area of the product you are using.

The good parts: Contact and calendering managament. Just works. Integrates nicely with Android, Thunderbird, etc. Not very good synching back to Google though. I don't really care about that, but now you know.

The not so good parts: I tried running it on my NAS, because that would be the storage-backend for the file-sync service anyway. I quickly discovered that the code is not near efficient enough to be deployed on underpowered devices like this. It needs optimization, or to be put on proper hardware. I chose the latter and redeployed.

On my NAS, with enough data getting synched across clients could take days. So don't even think about putting this on a Raspberry Pi or something silly like that.

The worse: Using owncloud's files-module as a drop-in Dropbox replacement, you will be surprised by how well supported all kinds of platforms are. If you treat it as a Dropbox replacement though, you will encounter issues.

I tried putting my code/project/build-folders under owncloud and hack away, much like I've done with Dropbox. Even with a limited amount of clients, you will quickly encounter at least some bugs. The most annoying thing I encountered was probably getting conflicts when only one of the clients had updated the file.

The client updated the file, called back to owncloud with the changes, and then got a response back that this update cannot be done cleanly.

It then proceeded to the code/build/project files involved in the conflict and rename the local and the "server"-version to $file.conflict345678543 & $file.conflict1234567 or something to that effect. Needless to say that broke my code, my build and needed to be cleaned up.

If you think that sounds annoying, imagine it happening several times during a 30 minute coding session.

So yeah. The owncloud file-service currently suffers and cannot be treated as a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. Hopefully it will get there, but outside coding, I haven't experienced anything like that and it seems to chug along just fine. With a high CPU-usage though.

So yeah. There are good, not so good and directly bad things about it. If it fits your use-case is up to you.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#86

Post by da_n »

josteink wrote: post #84
da_n wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data at random which would be unacceptable to me. I am using Baikal for CardDav and CalDav which has been very reliable so far, and BitTorrent Sync for Dropbox replacement which is less reliable and has some bad bugs (one of which is it being closed source).

How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data Good question. I have mixed impressions of owncloud so far depending on what area of the product you are using. The good parts: Contact and calendering managament. Just works. Integrates nicely with Android, Thunderbird, etc. Not very good synching back to Google though. I don't real…

Thanks for your detailed reply. It pretty much mirrors things I've heard elsewhere, it seems file sync is one issue in particular which can be slow and prone to errors, it is a shame as an all in one solution would be great.

Funnily enough I have both Baikal and BitTorrent Sync running on a Raspberry Pi (model B/512) and it is handling it surprisingly well, I even use it as a destination backup server for some VPS's and local computers (using duplicity). I just wish the Pi had more RAM as BTSync is a bit of a memory (and CPU) hog when you start to hae a lot of files involved, it is under strain. My compromise has been to tar a lot of folders I rarely access to cut down the number of individual files it needs to track, not ideal. I was thinking of buying one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing I think it is called, which is more powerful but still power effecient enough to be left on 24/7.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#87

Post by tripzilch »

mih wrote: post #57
jarcoal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people used Opera because of it's rendering engine; they used it because of the GUI and high-level features. Moving to webkit just let them focus on what actually made them unique to their customers.

The Myopera forums are rife with users complaining about missing features in the Opera 15+. Any unique features which distinguished Opera have been axed and most solutions seem to point towards using browser addons to accomplish what was previously in-built. They might have gained a few users, but it appears the majority of the current userbase will be sticking with Opera 12 for the time being.

I heard that they ditched the fit-to-width feature (ctrl-F11), do you know if this is true?

It's one of those features other browsers simply do not have (Opera has a couple more but this one's pretty unique) that I really do use several times a day, and I'm not "upgrading" until I know they won't take that away.

Not that it matters too much, features or not, I'm thinking to switch to Firefox because these are times no longer to be using closed-source software.

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#88

Post by tripzilch »

_sabe_ wrote: post #33
jarcoal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people used Opera because of it's rendering engine; they used it because of the GUI and high-level features. Moving to webkit just let them focus on what actually made them unique to their customers.

I used to use Opera because of it's privacy features. Being able to have different configuration of javascript, cookies, referals, content blocking and so on. Now with Opera 16 all these features are gone. How do you increase you're competitive abilities by removing everything that made you unique when you're already the underdog? :S

You forget to mention that they are "per site" preferences.

But wtf they removed this too?? What is wrong with those people?

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#89

Post by majelix »

frenger wrote: post #38
chrischen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stance you should take on privacy in the cloud is that the USA just did a bad job hiding the fact that you had none.

Sick of this nihilist attitude. > the USA just did a bad job hiding the fact that you had none. Er, no - the USA are the main ones wholesale intercepting everyone's shit - I'm not a US citizen and I don't like it in principle. I did have a pretty good expectation of privacy until they started doing that, because no-one else has the resources to do a similar whole-take surveillance effort. Anyway, I signed up for Fast…

> Er, no - the USA are the main ones wholesale intercepting everyone's shit

Why do you think this is? Do you really believe these efforts are not being taken by every major world covert agency?

Re: FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera

#90

Post by tripzilch »

sudomal wrote: post #72
benologist wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless Opera are building themselves their own little Firefox OS kind of thing they're pretty much fucked moving forward. On the desktop their move to webkit successfully destroyed every reason to use Opera and doesn't measure up against rivals, and they've been netscaped out of mobile.

Developing an in-house browser engine is rather expensive. It's a moving target with constant pressure to better rivals. There's a need to patch an infinite number of websites, which don't care that you exist. I can understand why they switched and focused on value added features.

> I can understand why they switched and focused on value added features.

But they didn't. They just dropped the browser engine.

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