Mitro is Shutting Down on August 31st

https://www.mitro.co/shutdown.html

by boristhespider • 11 years ago

66 40 11 years ago

mitro.co

minimaxir• 11 years ago

They were apparently acquihired by Twitter a year ago: http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/twitter-mitro/

So not unusual.

biturd• 11 years ago

Even @twittereng replied saying "welcome to the flock" so indeed they were acquired/aquihired by twitters.

gingerlime3• 11 years ago

Such a shame to see it go. A fantastic password manager to use. Amazingly slick interface, cross-platform support, intuitive UI. We would have happily paid for it (we can't afford $200/month, but maybe $20 or $40 - we're a small team of 5 people using it).

Big thanks to the Mitro team for keeping it alive until now. I'm still hopeful that this imminent closure will prompt someone to pick up the open-source project and keep it alive for longer (but understand that it's not an easy task).

mistermann• 11 years ago

Honestly, you'd pay $4 to $8 per month per user for a password manager?

josegonzalez2• 11 years ago

At SeatGeek, we use Lastpass. I don't personally know what it costs - yes, I'm a lazy operations person - but it seems like it might be $24 per person at our size[1].

I personally use 1Password and if it had group password sharing, I would be lobbying to switch every day of the fucking week. The lastpass interface is confusing, slow, and ugly (I've beens spoiled by the spit and polish we've built). $8 per person compared to what we may be paying now seems very small, so it's probably not unreasonable (to be fair, enterprise pricing is hella weird).

- [1] https://lastpass.com/enterprise/pricing-roi/

shalmanese• 11 years ago

If the average developer's time is worth $60 an hour, then it would only have to save 4 - 8 minutes per month for it to be worth it, or 10 seconds a day.

misterdata• 11 years ago

I only had a brief look at the source code (it's over at Github) but it seems one could easily run their own server?

weitzj• 11 years ago

yes. you can do this failry easy. There are ansible playbooks and some readmes. There is some mailservice baked in, which you might have to change.

The only 'harder' part is (the last time I tried): You have to build the browser extensions you want to use, and override the path to the mitro server to point to your server. The config file is all centralized. So you change it once and can build all extensions at once. I did not find an options to customize the mitro server via the extension itself. (this is probably a good thing).

To get your customized extensions to your users, you might have to create an extra download site or fix the links in the mitro webpage.

sethammons• 11 years ago

that makes me wonder if it would not be an interesting idea to have a plugin that points to a known proxy and you register your host with it. then the operations cost is low, a single plugin can be released, and you control the server and data. just a random thought (typing on mobile with no spelling check, please excuse typos).

vijayp4• 11 years ago

You can actually change the server in a hidden preferences page. Go to /html/preferences.html in the extension.

philippnagel2• 11 years ago

$200/month for the whole technical infrastructure?

eps• 11 years ago

Seems about right for a service of their type and size - probably a couple of servers and some external monitoring.

cjbprime• 11 years ago

They might be asking in the hope that many people will reply and each take them up on the offer.

vijayp4• 11 years ago

Yeah, our largest costs are: - a primary server running on AWS - a read-only replica running on google compute engine. Other smaller costs include networking, DNS, and various tax/administrative/regulatory fees

shawnb576• 11 years ago

How much of this is the $$$ and how much is the effort?

IOW, if this thing was to generate $500/month, would you keep bothering to operate it?

I happily pay $24/year for NewsBlur. I would happily pay/donate at that rate for Mitro.

And it sounds like _just_ the people in this thread would get you pretty close to $200/month given a model like that. I know more that would.

As other commenters said, the platform integration and password sharing are really, really great.

alexggordon• 11 years ago

I've used Mitro ever since I heard about it. It's been really fantastic to use, and the team did an incredible job creating it. It has everything I look for in a password manager, even without any updates or changes since it's been open sourced.

On a different note, even though I'd pay to use it, after following the Google Group pretty closely, it seems like Mitro has been unable to foster any sort of development community in the short time the project has been open source. I would have loved to help, but mitro-core is written in Java[0], a language I have little experience with (I don't count my Data Structures class in college).

I'm curious if the demise of Mitro could be a useful case study of how not to open source a big codebase. It seems that they're shutting it down primarily because of lack of development interest, including lack of interest from the original creators. It could be naturally assumed that they were "expecting" a community to form around Mitro, and embrace the open sourceness of it, but that obviously didn't happen. I wonder if the founders would have done something different with the way they open sourced Mitro, given what has transpired.

[0] https://github.com/mitro-co/mitro/tree/master/mitro-core

hga• 11 years ago

Open source Firefox took a long time to get anywhere, from Jan 1998 to Sept 2002 for initial release; as Jamie Zawinski when he checked out in March 1999 (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html):

Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out.

evanj4• 11 years ago

Open sourcing things is hard, and yes we did the classic mistake of "throwing it over the wall" and not being able to give it the time and attention it would need to be successful. We guessed that would likely be the outcome, but we were willing to try any possibility for Mitro to continue.

nstart• 11 years ago

They've put out the indication as early as March this year. Just found this:

@MitroCo's Tweet: https://twitter.com/MitroCo/status/577435506524336128?s=09

hyperpape• 11 years ago

It's not long, but why leave a week where you can create new accounts for a dying service?

evanj4• 11 years ago

There are some companies using it. It is possible that on-boarding a new person RIGHT NOW while they figure out their long-term solution is helpful. Small possibility, but I want to make this transition as easy as possible.

coherentpony• 11 years ago

I'm pretty stunned by the number of projects or services I discover exist by people posting their "X is shutting down" announcements on HN.

aytekin• 11 years ago

That might explain why they are shutting down.

evanj4• 11 years ago

Pretty much. It turns out that marketing is hard. :)

shmenwan• 11 years ago

This was a fantastic program and it saddens me greatly to see it go. I hope that someone will pick it up again, or perhaps find a way for the rest of us to run our own servers, since switching to another password manager that doesn't do as good of a job (at least not for free) is going to be quite the inconvenience.

vijayp4• 11 years ago

The code is open sourced as GPL3, you should be able to run your own server pretty easily. Please let us know if you have issues.

https://github.com/mitro-co/mitro

Immortalin2• 11 years ago

I am interested in taking over. I have a business idea for it, maybe it might just save the project.

vanmount• 11 years ago

Can you provide a bit more info? I'd be interested in maintaining the project as it is right now in my spare time...

Immortalin2• 11 years ago

Email?

philippnagel2• 11 years ago

I am also interested, as I think Mitro is a beautiful solution.

My e-mail can be found in my profile.

someear• 11 years ago

I assume at $200/month it somehow becomes worth it to keep going as someone's side project? I can't imagine twitter would keep it around for that little revenue (unless the acquihire from last year was simply just a hire, without buying the legal mitro entity)

gingerlime3• 11 years ago

it seems to be the case. According to [0] Twitter just hired the devs without the legal entity behind Mitro, and seems like with no intention of supporting the project going forward.

[0]https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mitro-dev/cgFhvuPyUiE/o-sFkE... (Legally speaking: Mitro is run by Lectorius Inc, which has no legal relationship to Twitter Inc. It is a wholly owned independent company.)

klapinat0r• 11 years ago

I've also used Mitro ever since I first saw it, and I'm really sad to see it go (had plans to implement the server in python, but at the risk of overseing a security flaw I opted not to)

Lately I've been looking at pass[0], do any of you have experience running this (with git)?

[0] http://www.passwordstore.org/

imrehg• 11 years ago

Oh, no, too bad! Mitro is a real life-saver, using it since the very beginning... This will be quite a step back for my web-usage-happiness-level.

I was wondering how will they make money, and looks like I need not to wonder any longer :(

Mitro is Shutting Down on August 31st

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