I'm not quite sure how/why you think this is news. Something going open source historically means 99% death. I really hope you get to be that 1% of the lucky ones... but...
Something not going open source historically also means 99% death.
99% of all software die, whether open source or closed source. Not sure what point you're trying to make. The (flawed) point that something will die because it's open source?
So I am pretty sure you have your successful open source story to share. Where you saved the queen, anything green, the oxygen, as we know it - and made millions along the way - while slaying bad guys around.
I believe at this point most of the people on news.ycombinator are well aware of the "work at startup" bait. If you are that good to help a startup to grow from 0 to millions, you typically get $150K at Google (for example). For the 4-5 years it typically gets for the very few successful startups to cash out, you will be earning $750K for sure + benefits + sanity + normal life.
If you are that good and you are not one of the founders, you have to be very careful in your decision to join a startup. For every success story (it gets multiplied x 1,000,000 by the press), there are thousands of dramas and flops noone hears about.
Agreed, there's a serious risk vs reward problem of founders vs first employees. I see founding as an exciting option, equity, control, low/no pay before revenue or funding.
First employees face a different risk, starting with a competitive but subpar salary with very small equity and little stability (get fired and your vested equity goes away), and they work long hours like founders.
If you found, you have to find a way to make it worth the risk to early employees. Many founders go the route of hiring first employees out of school where their options are slimmer.
My "normal life" is pretty awesome. Happy hour and meals with friends and girlfriend several times a week. Exercise most days. Most weekends include at least one of: hiking, rock climbing, skiing, snowshoeing, mountain climbing; often in wilderness areas with no cell phone coverage. Movies, live music, theater. Time to read books.
It's mostly about the flexibility, not the after-work things. After working in a flexible environment for the last 10 years, and doing a little bit of 9-5 style work for the last few weeks, it really sucks.
I was about to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. I think the type of people who are most drawn to startups are the ones who go insane working the so called "normal life". I prefer to work at startups - maybe that means I'm crazy. But I prefer my brand of crazy over other people's version of normal.
I agree. I recently worked as an Engineer at a startup for 2 years and helped take them from nothing to large scale. But after n many rounds of fund-raising and no additional stock option bonuses whats my incentive to stay? Founders, don't think that you can maintain a developers interest and enthusiasm in your idea over a period of years w/o some additional cash or options on the table.
And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money ($99 for an engine, mind you, that may save you hundreds of hours development time). How much do you charge per hour? Can this library save you hundreds of hours? Do the math.
I am not surpirsed at all that the average tech startup is a failure, with more than half of the people failing to get the "charge money for product/service" model everyone else in the world is using.
Oh no, it costs money. So what exactly are you trying to start that succeeds without having a price tag on it? Man, I get tired of this, really. For every spot-on comment on HN, I read 5 that make me dumber each day.
For the game market right now, no, it's not worth $99, because:
1. HTML5, and more specifically Canvas, isn't ready to deliver on its gaming promises yet. Too many slow/incomplete implementations to be fully cross-browser/cross-platform.
3. In a year it is likely to be obsoleted by engines based around other HTML5 technologies(CSS and SVG make for stronger "general 2D scenegraph" technologies, and WebGL is faster). It's a feature-poor engine - the highlights are the collision system and map editor - and the existing free ones are similar.
If you do buy this engine, it's probably because of ignorance, which in itself is a bad sign. There's reams of game code lying around the internet, and the most important thing isn't having the code but having an understanding of how it works. You are better served by buying a book on engine creation, reading that, and reading open source engine code, than to buy one set of documented engine code and only read that.
The only time this equation differs is when we're talking about features that are not dime-a-dozen and are truly a pain to integrate properly. I would be more impressed if it had one or more of:
* A tightly integrated full-physics engine(in addition to the basic platforming collision)
* Scene serialization/in-game editing
* More of a story for UI code - menus, settings, user profiles, keybind configuration, etc.
* Networking features
* Features for AI design(for example a state machine editor).
2. flash = javascript + super vector libs + sweet IDE. it has been around for a decade+ so yes: it is better.
3.a. 3D (webgl) does not make 2D obsolete. I'm not sure you imply that?
3.b. not everyone wants a scene graph for doing games. SVG + CSS is superior if you want a scene graph but plenty (and i would argue: the best) libraries for opengl, sdl, you name it are non scene graph driven.
Is there even a demo I can try for free? Sorry, but chances are just as high that the library costs me time - time I invest to understand it, only to eventually find that it probably won't do what I need, and I can't easily fix it or extend it. (Playing devil's advocate here).
Even if it does what I need now, who knows if it does what I need in two years? If it were open source, somebody could pick it up and keep developing it. Now if the commercial dev just abandons it, my investment in learning "impact" was wasted.
This is my problem, I'd be willing to pay much more if I could try it out and kick the tires. Abandonware is a problem in the gaming engine community... even a success story is only going to be around a few years.
A big problem is that by the time you fully understand any game engine (I've looked into) it might just be obsolete. The cost of learning the engine dwarfs the cost of licensing... Assuming your time is worth anything.
>> And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money...
Why do you think this is unique to HN?
In my experience, this is a common mindset. If anything, I think you have a higher ratio of people willing to adopt commercial libraries here than many other development communities.
If I had a penny for every time I've read an open-source vs. proprietary software thread in the past 2 decades I might have enough to buy this framework. But then I wouldn't benefit from the contributions of other users and the freedom to modify the source code to fit my own needs.
And there are plenty of pricing options beyond the actual code.
What do you mean by "the typical HN oh no"? Not for nothing, but I see literally only 3 comments that could be considered "negative", and they're all pretty mild.
That out of the way, I can't help but think you're missing something else. Who exactly are you assuming is the likely purchaser of this product?
>For every spot-on comment on HN, I read 5 that make me dumber each day.
Please re-read the HN guidelines.
>Can this library save you hundreds of hours? Do the math.
I doubt it. I imagine it would cost me time I didn't even know I had, when someone who could have been extending and patching the platform is instead extending and patching a FOSS platform. Closed toolkits only work at large scales where you've got a dedicated team responding to every issue. Even then, they're sub-optimal.
It's much easier to dedicate all your time and respond to every issue when it's what's paying the bills. FOSS support and longevity are terrible, and this is from someone who maintains a dozen such projects.
Software support and longevity are terrible, and this is from someone who uses hundreds of such products. I go in expecting bad support, and as such it's only natural that I don't like paying.
The daily Microsoft bashing HN post. There are literally thousands of startups started by ex-Microsoft marketers, developers, sales people and they are doing great. Microsoft is definitely doing great as well.
People are smart and can adapt. They will fight for politics and budget in big organization and they will get work done at startups. Labeling someone as "non-hire" just because they worked in Microsoft is plain stupid. Neglecting so much success and real on the field experience - definitely not smart.
By the way, using the same logic - marketers from Google and Facebook shoud not be hired too? Or this will not appeal to the HN community, no Microsoft, so noone to hate.
Of course reading the OP author bio confirms that - senior positions at Siebel, IBM, etc - they are obviously THAT MUCH different from Microsoft, really. So much hypocrisy. So much bullshit.
The microsoft bashing here is pretty minimal. Hackers in general do not like microsoft because it makes sub par lousy buggy ill thought out products, operates morally questionable business practices, and is fairly incompetent with new products.
Microsoft got lucky, once, by being in the right place at the right time (And having the right connections).
I'm not saying I agree with the OP or not, but any microsoft bashing that goes on is more than warranted. They have crushed businesses, held back innovation, wasted millions of hours of peoples lives trying to make IE not completely suck, etc
They do not innovate to improve users experience, they act to defend their monopoly. Look at the mozilla vs IE story. Once IE was dominant, they shelved development of it for years - it had served its purpose, which was to crush mozilla and hold back innovation of the web as a platform.
To be fair, they got lucky a good many times. They wrote a BASIC interpreter (MITS even paid them to work on that) for the nascent personal computer industry that was mostly there when needed.
Microsoft's BASIC was the first language many of us learned to program in. The other day I solved Google's "are you a programmer" tests using both an Apple //e and a TRS-80 Model III (emulated with MESS). It was nostalgic.
I think it might be fair to say that MS has gotten "lucky" more times than probably any other tech company, including Apple. Maybe only IBM has gotten "lucky" more often, but they also have a much longer history.
Microsoft didn't have to count entirely on luck - the were also aided by some really incompetent competitors...
I remember shopping for a new desktop PC right after OS/2 2.0 was launched. IBM charged more for a PC with their own OS (even though it included Windows) than for one with Windows alone, the sheer boneheadedness of that baffled me so completely the person on the other side of the phone taking my order thought I hung up. In the end, I forked out the extra US$ 50 or so and got the OS/2 box. The OS was really nice, very advanced for the time.
At that time, running a Unix GUI on a PC was a ludicrous proposition.
Seriously though, some of the biggest operating systems (my research area, OS virtualization in specific) advances have come out of Microsoft Research and Windows kernel development.
Thank you. Those are very interesting reads. It's been a long time since I played with really cutting-edge OS concepts and virtualization has never been my main interest (I was into hardware during college).
I'd hire a developer from Microsoft for sure. Solely for the reason that they have an inside knowledge with Microsoft products that your average developer might not, furthermore they might have enough connections that you can get insider-info on what might be involved in the next MS OS before everyone else gets the info.
I think you overestimate the knowledge an MS dev has outside of their team. Talk to any of them and you'll quickly find out how little they know outside their area. It's a very big company with a lot of silos.
Most "inside information" is spread by watercooler talk anyway -- which is a lot less common when products are separated by building.
The number one source for insider Microsoft information is Microsoft interns. Why? We're in almost every product division in Microsoft and we have our own inter-departmental social groups. I heard of some serious insider information not just on MS, but on Intel, Nvidia, etc. just from hanging out and drinking with the other interns on weekends.
Many of the same concerns apply to hiring developers from Microsoft. If it's just one stop on a varied career, or if it's combined with some open source activities, then I'm not too concerned; if it's their only full-time job or they've been there for a long time, then my initial reaction is concerned about what kinds of habits and mindsets they've fallen into.
"Open Source Developer" is not a job or career or profession. How many people out there really make their money checking in open source code? 0.1% of all developers? 0.01%? Most people do it in their free time, use it as marketing tool for their consulting/commercial offers, etc.
Miguel de Icaza for one might have Macbook, but I am sure it at least dual boots to Windows. It would not be possible otherwise, since he needs to run .NET non-stop and copy/paste code from Reflector to his Mono implementation, or whatever they are doing to clone .NET to Mono.
And I am pretty sure Apple Software has nothing to do with how they really win their bucks. So no need to look for logic here - they just like the shiny hardware cause they are geeks. That's it. No rocket science or philosophy here.
You cannot use Relector to contribute to the Mono source.
"Do not use the ildasm, reflector or other equivalent tools program to disassemble proprietary code when you are planning to reimplement a class for Mono. If you have done this, we will not be able to use your code."
" How many people out there really make their money checking in open source code?"
As an example -- Last I checked, most kernel commits were done by folks paid to write code. Similarly, most Ubuntu work is done by Cannonical; Debian, GNOME, Mono, Apache and Webkit (among many many others) all have paid open source developers.
"he needs to run .NET non-stop and copy/paste code from Reflector to his Mono implementation"
That's a pretty bold claim to make. If you're not trolling, do you have solid evidence to back this up?
That's why noone is taking you seriously, folks. Copy/Pasting .NET and you claim you do not even have the original on your machine - nobody is going to use your crap. How on Earth am I going to trust my business on Mono when you claim that ridiculous shit.
This is not correct. There were multiple MVC frameworks on top of ASP.NET years ago, including Monorail and FubuMVC and a lot more actually. All of them were open source. Some of them were quite good, actually.
Were you active there? Did you contribute something? Did you commit fixes/features. No, you did not. But of course you do contribute to the complaining.
Another day, another leaving .NET/Java for Ruby/Python post. This very link btw got posted twice, the first post was 3 months ago. Aren't you guys tired of that? We get it - HN is the place where people will go at great lengths to contribute/code all night rather than use something that works out of the box and juts move on. I am always surprised on the often hardcore technical problems discussed here and the relative lack of in-depth startup/business topics - and this is what starting up a company really is all about.
ASP.NET MVC is probably in the top 3 web frameworks created, and WebForms is not that bad either. ViewState/Page-Lifecycle - you can use this or not - it is up to you. You can always do the HTML5 stuff in ASP.NET too, and most of the code is jQuery now anyway, so why the big fuss?
And what do you mean there is no community around ASP.NET? Have you heard about StackOverflow? The majority of the devs are ASP.NET developers there, with ASP.NET and C#/Javascript being the most tagged posts - literally every single question gets answered asap.
And what's wrong with the 3rd party vendors? They exist, support and enhance the eco-system producing some great tools along the way. Like Rasharper. Like UI widgets. Like database tools. How many times have you seen an open source project with great potential just die because there was nobody to take over and maintain it? Understand - some companies have REAL business out there - not the next social this, web that average crap startups have on $0 revenue. They want REAL partners that they can rely on and WILL pay for that. Heck, you are paying $100K to your developers, why not pay $5K for a proven software and win some time/use the resources of the partner? What is the friggin' deal with that?
Grow up. Is it like mid-age crisis? You just need switching things now and then and trying to figure out the reasons? One of the top reasons I've seen companies fail is to switch technologies just for the sake of switching and "keeping it fun" - from a business point of view it is ridiculous to invest 8 years in a framework and then just switch, like that.
I think this story is so interesting because so many of us could never imagine leaving .net. It's got a real shock factor to it. Like someone winning the lottery and throwing away the ticket.
I'd be interested to know why a contrary opinion honestly held and expressed deserves your downvote (or the 2+ it did get), or your pointless comment.
There is an HN Two Minutes Hate aspect to the steady march of "MS platforms stagnant / not supercool like the flavour of the week we're putting into production" posts getting voted into the front page. News about actual open source projects and cool stuff on C#/F#/.NET/Mono tends to languish / fail to hit front page, consistently. It's fair to call this out.
I'm not saying that open source is staggeringly vibrant and healthy on .NET, though it is making steady progress. I simply try to keep in mind that there is a whole wide world of workaday devs who punch a clock out there, and .NET has big reach into that world.
Sure, it is fair to call this out and I am glad people are doing so. What I find off-putting is the way in which the commenter did so. There is clearly no interest in a civil discussion when someone suggests that the opposing side needs to "Grow up" and that their opinions are the result of a mid-life crisis.
As for my comment being pointless, I agree. Shame on me. Won't happen again.
EDIT: Upvoting you for busting me on my hypocrisy.
Why are people always writing these types of posts? .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered, no need to bash Microsoft on that. And what's the deal with licensing? We, as software developers and entrepreneurs, eventually want to charge money for some product/service and I personally find it much easier to do in .NET/Corporate settings - Microsoft has just managed to educate people that software costs money.
I find it much, much harder to charge money (I'm in the developer tools space) in the "FREE", open source, free is beer, as... whatever, and all that crap world, where people would just expect you to work full-time several years with $0 revenue - I just do not understand all that crap.
So massive respect to Microsoft - these guys are doing us a huge favor by educating people that software costs money.
> Why are people always writing these types of posts?
Most probably because...
> .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered
... simply isn't true.
Unless you are saying it's one of the 10.000 best programming environments ever engineered or that others, like Smalltalk/80, Genera, Interlisp, Turbo Pascal, the NeXT toolset, Zope, Rails, Django were "grown" rather than engineered. I agree VS is and has consistently been the best single IDE when you are using Windows to write software that runs on Windows, but it fails miserably out of its narrow domain (however deep it is, as it accounts for a huge market share). It's much like Xcode being the best IDE for using an Apple computer to write software that runs on Apple computers. It certainly is.
Microsoft deserves some recognition, for many times they delivered what the market needed. From its very first BASIC interpreter, to Windows, to Windows for Workgroups, to the first affordable alternative to Unix on RISC boxes (NT, for those too young to remember), to Visual Basic (the only language many corporate developers ever knew) they more or less set the tone of the entire PC industry.
As for charging money for software, the market changed. It's like complaining you can no longer sell ice blocks because everybody owns a refrigerator or that you don't sell as many carriages as you once did because people prefer cars. Embrace the change, use the tools and help build them into even more impressive ones (from the list I showed in the first "real" paragraph, 4 have always either been open-source or have a direct descendant that is). You can use them for free, you can build on them and you can improve them so they better suit your needs.
>As for charging money for software, the market changed.
I do not agree. Nothing is free, its just that costs continually get shifted else where into abstraction. If you pay money to advertise your service then you and (others) are all indirectly paying for your software (and others') so you can be able to offer your software 'free'. If you say, choose to monetize by ads.
Really there has not yet emerged an economic model that beats simple old just charge money for it in terms of ease of implementation and use, reliability and path to profitability for someone starting off.
Sell Ads, take a minuscule rent to display ads other people bought, micro-payments, licensing, charging for support (urgh!), free (crippled) version to bait to a paid version are actually all more of the same. Except that all but the last requiring a large amount of traction in activity, reputation, users or both. Something very not easy to get, requiring a much longer runway than is feasible for most.unless they wish to seek investment, which is its own can of worms.
But I do agree, this direct charging is not going to work much longer than this decade I don't think. It is going to be very interesting to see what sort of new economic models evolve to support consumption and greed. These are interesting times. I hope to be part of it.
"It's much like Xcode being the best IDE for using an Apple computer to write software that runs on Apple computers. It certainly is."
Actually, so long as I'm writing C++, I greatly prefer QtCreator over XCode. It actually helps me navigate my code, whereas XCode just seems to get in the way.
I'd agree that XCode is the best IDE for writing Objective-C apps for OS X on a Mac... but only because it's in a field of one (as far as I know). In my opinion it's a truly terrible IDE.
In order to determine what's "on par" with .NET/VS, you have first to define your goal. If it is writing web apps for Windows servers, it's pretty good. If it's writing desktop apps for Windows using C/C++/C#/VB.net, then VS is an obvious choice.
If, however, your goal is to deliver a desktop application that runs on Windows, MacOS X and other Unixes, or an app that runs on Symbian mobile phones, VS is worst than useless.
You should not count which platforms it runs on. The claim was:
> .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered
What you're doing is when somebody claims "trains are more energy efficient than cars" then you say "but not if you run a train on a road"/"you can't run a train on a road". This is true but that was not the claim, the claim is clearly about the productivity a programmer has with the tools for developing applications for the platforms that the respective tools are targeting.
And you can build applications that run on OS X and Linux with VS.
> And you can build applications that run on OS X and Linux with VS.
It would be every bit as pretty as driving a train over a road...
VS is a space shuttle. Very complex, very impressive and with a very limited usage. To its credit and unlike the shuttle, it can do one thing very well.
It all depends on your priorities. If all you do is write Windows software, VS is the best. If what you do is web apps that will run on Unix-like servers on platforms like J2EE, Django, Rails, Flask or anything like it, you can tweak it until it becomes barely usable. Of course, only as long as you conform yourself to running your workstation on an environment profoundly different from what the app will run on production.
Priorities matter. I wouldn't use a Formula 1 race car to launch a satellite, regardless of how much they are impressive vehicles. Compared to what it takes to launch a satellite, they are, really, quite unimpressive.
If, however, your goal is to deliver a desktop application that runs on Windows, MacOS X and other Unixes...VS is worst than useless.
Not at all true. Setting up VS to work with Qt isn't too hard. And once you've got it set up it's a perfectly fine tool for writing cross platform Qt apps. Then to build and test you just do some clever stuff with virtual machines and you are good to go.
not true if you're developing the desktop app in Silverlight which will run in all of those desktop environments (of course Moonlight is not an official release from MSFT)
There's more startups charging consumers now than anytime I can remember. It used to be that unless your startup was retail based, it was free. Those days are gone.
The unfortunate truth is that big companies can play that game - this or that is free and commoditizing software in general - they can win elsewhere. A very good example is what Google is doing with browsers and all kinds of software just to win on AdWords/Sense.
The bad news is that small companies cannot do that easily - they typically rely on a single product/service that they need to charge people for, like any traditional business out there.
Same with app stores - they are pretty much forcing 3rd party devs to give away or sell for pennies. Sure, we get this occasional story of a successful mobile product, but the truth is for each success there are tens of thousands of apps making close to nothing.
This, for me, is NOT a good trend for software startups. The whole "free" movement make it exceedingly hard to sell software nowadays.
At the same time that OSS makes software unsellable, it also makes SaaS profitable. For example it's becoming really tough to sell version control software but totally feasible to sell a version control service, in both cases because of excellent OSS software.
We are the worst market out there to sell because we all love to build different colored dog houses and paint bike sheds various shades purple.
- - -
I've loved VS.NET in the past, but it doesn't make me happy any more. Personally, I can't have fun working with it. It is impressive, but it lacks soul.
> So massive respect to Microsoft - these guys are doing us a huge favor by educating people that software costs money.
Unlike Apple and Google which educate people that software costs 0.99$ or is free. What the heck can I charge if Id software publishes their latest game for 0.99$?
Aside from the many valid MS-specific issues, my recent take on "why I abandoned X for Y" is that programming is still an inherently hard and frustrating activity. The final results are frustrating compared to the promise of X; The problems of Ruby-on-Rails or .NET or beautiful Perl one-liners whatever don't appear tell you get to a certain scale. So the next great thing (or the retro-great-thing or whatever) can always look good compared to the big mess you've land yourself in. And .NET could well be the best engineered system in the world for all I know but it's crazy frustrating once you get to a certain scale.
Therefore, we should abandon X and do Y, whose promises haven't yet been broken.
>Why are people always writing these types of posts? .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered, no need to bash Microsoft on that.
People write these kinds of posts all the time. You see more of them on sites like this because people who tend to dislike and put down Microsoft and feel good about their choice constantly upvote this kind of posts.
Stackoverflow is a example of a site which shows off that C#/.NET done in a proper way is a very platform.
> shows off that C#/.NET done in a proper way is a very platform.
I could agree C#/.NET is a very platform, if I could understand what that means.
With lots of work and a talented team like SO's you can do a lot of extraordinary things done. The fact that SO stands apart as "C#/,NET done right" shows how much work it is to build a website on that stack.
The co-relations of driving, being a doctor, etc are really making me laugh hard. How much of what you have guys written is that important? FourSquare... look at me, I'm at McDonads and taking a pee
You guys are taking yourself why too seriously, for a (most probably) lousy job.
Thank you HN for that unique experience. You are almost as good as state school and IT hot-shot series at Martha Stewart TV.