We Open Source Everything

https://blog.latency.at/2018-03-28-we-open-source-everything

by discordianfish • 8 years ago

176 57 8 years ago

blog.latency.at

rawrmaan• 8 years ago

Good stuff. Sentry does this too and I think it benefits everyone.

On the other hand, man that custom font is tough on the eyes.

ch4s3• 8 years ago

Wow, you weren't kidding, that font is rough.

smoyer3• 8 years ago

But you have to love "Reader Mode" (Firefox Aurora aka Developer Edition 60b06).

Mononokay2• 8 years ago

I actually like it quite a bit for some reason. It's a lot easier to focus on than a typical Sans/Serif font.

madspindel• 8 years ago

The fonts name is Kaputt which means broken in german. Looks like a broken version of Campton (another annoying font).

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Did they 'open source' that font?

SippinLean• 8 years ago

It's a great display face that should not be used for body copy.

oferzelig• 8 years ago

Hope they read this: they have a typo: provides -> provide.

Mononokay2• 8 years ago

Fourth paragraph, "sites performance" -> "site's performance"

ryandrake• 8 years ago

“builting upon”?

Proofreading works, everyone!

jotm4• 8 years ago

Something tells me they're not native English speakers, cut them some slack. Better English than many native English writers, anyway.

discordianfish2• 8 years ago

Thanks, I've fixed the typos. Indeed not a native speaker, should have re-read it a few times more.

nautilus12• 8 years ago

So the idea is that they are so confident in their human capital, clientele and business processes that even with all of the code no one could potentially compete with them? Or that they want to create more competitors?

TAForObvReasons• 8 years ago

This is actually a very good move for them. The type of person who could take the full code dump and stand up the service is likely the type of person who would just write it themselves.

meredydd• 8 years ago

They're selling an operational service that their customers can't easily replicate, even with the code.

Their product is a globally-distributed monitoring system. Running these systems all over the world, and keeping them running, is a serious operational headache. It's probably at least as complex as operating the service the customer wants to monitor - perhaps a lot more, given that most services are not globally distributed.

As long as they price below "double your ops budget", they'll remain value for money - even if the code they use is free.

yjftsjthsd-h• 8 years ago

Or in short: They're selling a service, not a product, so they can give away the products that they happen to use.

__s3• 8 years ago

Code is a liability

tonyedgecombe5• 8 years ago

But is open source less or more of a liability?

bazooka_penguin• 8 years ago

Does open sourcing everything affect software developers' job prospectives in anyway?

tonyedgecombe5• 8 years ago

I have mixed feelings about it, it seems to me giving away your code for no return indicates you don't really value it that much. Whether it will have an affect on the industry I don't know.

There was an interesting paper linked on HN a couple of years ago that indicated a lot of the money is disappearing from software sales. The inference was the availability of mysql depresses the revenue from MSSQL, the availability of Linux depresses the revenue from Windows and so on.

oblio3• 8 years ago

If you think about it, software is a tool, and more than that, it's usually a brick in a construction. I wouldn't expect bricks to go up in price.

cryptoz• 8 years ago

it seems to me giving away your code for no return indicates you don't really value it that much

Well of course it seems that way to you, because you have defined it circularly. Open sourcing code is in no way "giving it away for no return". There is massive return on open sourcing code, from money to improvements in the code and all other manner of things.

I have the opposite perspective from you. I think that closed source code indicates you don't value you it very much. But I understand that perspectives are different and that's okay. But you have made your own leap to not valuing code very much but you should know that the truth for a lot of people is the exact opposite of what you wrote.

davvolun• 8 years ago

giving away your code for no return

Open source is not actually giving away your code for no money, let alone no return. It's not free as in beer.

__s3• 8 years ago

I work as a software developer who's pushed for open sourcing code at our company (unsuccessfully). Premise is that the company's value isn't code, & the idea is that making it open source will produce a more successful product. Generally a software developer's job security correlates with a product's success. It may mean we don't need to hire more people, but I'm not looking to work at a large company, & less people means less mouths to feed

In my own experience I was trying to demonstrate that we didn't need to bastardize the codebase into a million pieces in order to give remote developers only the small part their working on; that we might as well make the code publically available

amarkov• 8 years ago

Certainly, but not in the direction I think you're implying. Open source means that you know how to solve all the problems MySQL has solved, even if you don't actually know how to implement a good database engine.

TomK32• 8 years ago

Basecamp is doing quite well despite open sourcing their framwork Ruby on Rails.

Don't forget, the vast majority of open source is paid for by companies.

jeremyjh• 8 years ago

This would be more like open sourcing Basecamp itself.

0xfaded• 8 years ago

I'm going to hijack this thread to mention that I'm thinking of open sourcing a SLAM system I've been working on under BSD or MIT.

Ive been working on this because I'm interested in underwater drones (uuvs), and hope to commercialise this in the form of services.

My current understanding is as follows:

- most open source systems come from universities and are GPL, with the option for licensing. (PTAM, ORB SLAM, DSO, SVO, LSD)

- Optimistically, it would require $1-3 million to build a compedative system privately. The sky is the limit here.

- No one, neither the universities nor private entities, is making serious money by licensing just a SLAM system. The well performing startups are somehow coupled to a product or a service.

- All systems basically solve the same problems, but mix and match different solutions. For example for initial motion estimation, you could rely on constant motion (DSO, ORB SLAM), image alignment (SVO), or solving directly for rotation between cameras (GSLAM).

- As a researcher, to implement a new idea, you either need to implement an entire system from scratch, or modify a GPL'd system. This is great in theory, but since everyone is playing the GPL or pay game they are reluctant to accept contributions.

I'm imagining something like opencv, with implementations of common algorithms accompanied by wiki pages describing high level details. Components could be mixed and matched into different reference SLAM systems targeting different use cases, do you want something that will run on a MAV or a self driving car?

From a commercial point of view, companies could worry more about tweaking things to work for a particular use case without needing to start from scratch. I believe that universities, with their many departments, have more opportunity than anyone else.

My belief is that it's time for a liberally licensed SLAM system. Has anyone come to a similar conclusion or care to comment to the contrary?

Thanks HN

stealthcat• 8 years ago

Can companies really get away for not licensing properly with GPL? I mean selling your product without buying the commercial license. How to get yourself caught? Different SLAM solves the same problem anyway.

singron• 8 years ago

It sounds like they own the copyright and are dual licensing. However they don't accept contributions (without a copyright assignment) since they wouldn't be able to dual license the contribution.

the_mitsuhiko2• 8 years ago

We (sentry.io) open source everything as either BSD/MIT or Apache2 and we not only get away with it but also think it’s the best way :)

snovv_crash• 8 years ago

I was thinking something similar. OpenCV has lots of pieces of the puzzle, but the quality is... inconsistent. For instance, I've had repeatable segfaults from doing RANSAC (which of course disappear in the debugger and Valgrind). There have also been some significant feature regressions since the 2.x --> 3.x migration, and the build system breaks every time MSVC upgrades.

If you'd like to release something like this I'd be happy to contribute. I have a background in SLAM, embedded and photogrammetry, so this is something I could really get behind.

taneq• 8 years ago

If you have a robust SLAM method which is relatively computationally efficient, and you release it under an unhindered or attribution license, I think a whole bunch of people would use that. I know I would.

I've been wanting to spend some time in that field myself but workload hasn't allowed it. Just out of curiosity, have you looked into DTAM (PTAM's successor) or RATSLAM? Both were on my shortlist for a future project.

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

You should definitely release it, but under GPL. Why do you think BSD or MIT are better?

jlg23• 8 years ago

"less politics" - and shouldn't you start by justifying your recommendation?

discordianfish2• 8 years ago

Hi,

I'm the guy behind latency.at. So far it's really just a little side project.

Since few people asked: I mainly open sourced it because I believe it's useful to have a complete, real life service as an example/inspiration.

stevekemp• 8 years ago

Which immediately resulted in a bug-report noting that their mailgun API key was committed into code:

https://gitlab.com/latency.at/latencyAt/issues/36

We Open Source Everything

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