But still, I just started using Firebase, and this news makes it clear to me that I should move off them as soon as I can. Firebase was an interesting technology supplier: When they were a small company, I could count on it that as a customer, I would count. Google is known to not give a damn about paying customers (ref: all the Google Apps customers who lose their email (for whatever reason) and get redirected to a FAQ page with answers to unrelated questions). Google is also known to Be Evil: I'm not sure I dare waiting until the terms change such that my user's data is subject to googlebot scanning.
Firebase's business model is aligned with my interests: the more users I have, the more I (hopefully) earn, so the more I pay Firebase. I strongly doubt, however, that Google is buying Firebase because they think they can get very rich selling Firebase subscriptions. It's either going to turn out a acquihire, or it is some part of a grand ecosystem plan. Acquihire means they'll pull the plug sooner or later, grand ecosystem plan means vendor lock-in. While I'm happy to be locked in to the services of a small independent business, I'd think twice before becoming entirely dependent on a company that could lose me as a customer and not even notice the slightest impact on their bottom line.
I know all of the Firebase guys are reading this, and I don't mean to piss on your parade. I'm certain you're not lying when you say that things are only going to get better. But I'm also certain that your jobs don't depend on that anymore, and when higher-ups decide to move the big boat's direction, Firebase might be over sooner than any of us wants it to.
That's a pretty big risk to take as a startup that fully depends on Firebase for their data storage.
I'd like to take that devil by the horns and strongly suggest that companies like Firebase, who clearly deliver a critical infrastructure dependency for anyone using their service, should open source their platform as an act of good faith toward their customers.
No one wants to run yet another cluster, but anyone with an eye to business continuity ought to want the assurance that they can migrate to and from their own servers if that need should arise.
That might not be in the short term interests of Firebase, but it's definitely in the long term interests of their customers. Why would anyone ever base the future of their own business on the exit needs of another company's investors? It is a ridiculous risk. As much as I love what Firebase has built, I'd never use it for anything more than a toy project for that exact reason.
Basho, ElasticSearch and Docker(?) seem to be on a good path with commercial open source models. Is there any reason that a startup like Firebase couldn't do both? Offer their open source product as a service with non-critical value adds? GitHub is another example that comes to mind. If they were to get bought and shut down, it would be a pain in the ass to set up new remotes, but no one would have to stop using git.
One company similar in services to FireBase is FanOut (fanout.io) and they share your open philosophy. Their server code is open source, and they make money by running it for you. I'm optimistic about FanOut and hope that they can be a success based on this model (and their service in general).
This is a great point. Just running the infrastructure is a big enough value-add. I wonder how well this is working for Discourse. Obviously a very different type of platform, but they're using this model and appear, from the outside, to be having success.
I'd also be very interested to see how things are turning out for Discourse as a business. I've been keeping an eye on OSS product + hosted businesses for awhile (Ghost being another one now).
It's not just Discourse and Ghost. Wordpress has been doing this since way before those projects were started and there's no sign that they're going away any time soon.
Maybe Google could open source it themselves. A lot of us didn't want to risk much on Firebase, because who knew what might happen to a small company. With the acquisition, we are now in the position of not wanting to risk a significant part of our business on an insignificant part of Google's.
What to do?
Google could resolve that by both hosting Firebase and open sourcing it. That way, you could outsource the critical Firebase management to Google and not have to build it yourself, while still having the security of knowing that if Google ever made it unavailable (shutting it down, worsening service, raising the price, etc.), you wouldn't be wiped out.
They already offer hosted database service for other OS databases. I hope they'll do the same with Firebase.
One interesting thing about the legacy of CouchDB is the sync protocol. There are now multiple implementations capable of syncing with each other, making it easy to migrate data to a different provider, even if the underlying implementation is different. I think there have been one or two forks and different service providers, and they can all exchange data without issue, as far as I know.
database-per-user is a common pattern with CouchDB. If you need to aggregate data across your users for reporting etc then you can use a server-side replication to create a "master" database which is only accessible to your internal users.
You could also use filtered replication but it is:
a) not scalable
b) not secure (the whole db would still be accessible to all users)
Couchbase has a different spin on this via "channels" though I'm not sure how it interoperates with PouchDB.
Couchbase Sync Gateway's channels are just slices through the data. The mechanism is internal to the Sync Gateway (you write a JS function that says who can see which channels and which channels a doc belongs to.) Replicating clients don't Need to know about this filtering, so channels work great with all flavors of Couch.
Before making suggestions like this and getting the HN bandwagon to support this POV, perhaps we should put ourselves in the startup's shoes?
Forcing an open source on acquisition severely limits your exit options and lowers your acquisition value. In terms of the companies you've mentioned with commercial open source models, none of them are clear successes. All still have battles to fight. Open source is a really hard path to take, and it's littered with dead companies and zombies who's revenues have been cannibalized by their open source creations.
As much as the users feel like startup founders owe them something, startup founders are human like everyone else. They don't exist to be our slaves. Imposing rules like this on companies would result in fewer tools and companies overall as the companies themselves would no longer make economic sense.
I don't have any links per say, but I have done extensive market research on this as it's a requirement in my job (I work at one of the aforementioned open source companies). A quick nitpick, regardless of what people publicly say to the press, I'm 100% positive that most companies are started with some financial motive.
It's not impossible to build a business around open source, but it's incredibly hard. Take MySQL for example. MySQL's initial pitch was this "We'll destroy 50% of the DB market, and then capture 25% of the remaining market." And MySQL the company never really made it. This is with arguably the largest pure technical market to ever exist (databases).
> Before making suggestions like this and getting the HN bandwagon to support this POV, perhaps we should put ourselves in the startup's shoes?
As a founder, I am in a startup's shoes, and my intention was not to provoke an angry mob, but merely to state my own opinion. I don't want to use Firebase for anything my own revenue will depend on, and that's a shame, because they have made an awesome product.
> Forcing an open source on acquisition severely limits your exit options and lowers your acquisition value.
These acquisitions of 3 year old companies are always sort of disappointing to me. On the one hand, I'm truly inspired and encouraged see their measure of success. On the other hand, I'd really like to see more startups committed to building lasting companies that strive for win-win outcomes that include users, employees, investors and founders. This isn't supposed to be a zero sum game.
> As much as the users feel like startup founders owe them something, startup founders are human like everyone else. They don't exist to be our slaves.
With a company like Firebase, there's a chain of trust that's really important. They are not responsible for just their own individual users. They are responsible for other companies' users. The effects of everything they do are multiplied accordingly.
Part of offering a platform is the guarantee that "this thing you depend on to serve your users will not go away unexpectedly without leaving a viable alternative." That's not an unreasonable thing for someone to demand when they're building their house on your foundation. Their use of your service also represents an investment of their own developer time. You go away, they lose that investment. If you as the operator of a platform don't want to take on that level of responsibility, don't go into that business.
> Imposing rules like this on companies would result in fewer tools and companies overall as the companies themselves would no longer make economic sense.
Who said anything about imposing rules? You're putting words in my mouth.
This isn't perfect and it contradicts my point about wanting to see sustainable companies, but I find it encouraging nonetheless. I think Firebase could have easily fallen into this category.
I'm not trying to say your opinion is incorrect. Judging by your response, you took my comment a little too harshly.
I'm trying to point out that there is a very large number of companies where open sourcing on acquisition doesn't make sense. And there's also very serious financial risk to founders if they choose to adopt this idea. The way you've stated this suggestion, I'm afraid unsuspecting founders will adopt this policy and shoot themselves in the foot a few years down the line.
I draw a lot of this from personal experience. I just sold my company a few months back, I currently work at an open source company (which you've already mentioned as one of the "model" OSS companies), I have first hand experience with a company getting acquired that had this "open source" clause a few weeks back, and I'm also heavily involved in the due diligence process for many tier 1 VCs that look to invest in the infrastructure space.
Having been through all of that, I can say that my personal outcome would not have been possible had I had the "open source" clause for my company, and we would have needed to pivot hard. The company acquired with this clause lost a vast majority of its acquisition value because of this "open source" clause. It's basically become a talent acq. And from doing due diligence/working at an OSS company, it's become clear that most founders SEVERELY underestimate the challenges in building an OSS company. It's a double edged sword. And it's one where arguably the edge facing you is sharper than the one facing your market.
I didn't take it personally at all and if you have the time and inclination I'd love to hear more about your experiences. Please feel free to email me. smith at anvil dot io.
But that's a thousand lines of code I don't have to write. And integrations I don't have to do. And libraries for lots of platforms.
I think you're undersstimating the added value – the point is that people don't have to bother setting up and maintaining all of those moving parts with a service like firebase.
Case in point, I was building a small real-time web serice this weekend; it's exactly the sort of thing that Firebase would be great for. But given that I couldn't run it locally, and that there's no migration path if they were to acquired and shut down, I had to implement a half-assed solution on my own. If Firebase had been open-source, I'd almost certainly have ended up forking over cash for them to host it anyway.
The project in which I implemented this toolset is working great and it only took me one weekend to implement too. I am not saying Firebase is inferior at all.
Just, for my situation, I am not sure why I need to pay for that functionality when I can literally set it up in one day vs reading the documentation on how to set it up on Firebase in the same time.
I also control all outcomes and avoid ones like this where Google could potentially take over control of a large portion of your app.
My server side code is about 100 lines. This controls a chat server, chat rooms, youtube video commands. And its currently working just fine with 4,000 visitors a day on a vps that cost $5 a month.
Why not learn how to do it yourself? Especially if you already have vps. I am using varnish with multiple sites and it took a couple hours to set up. I am really confused on this.
I think you're vastly underestimating what Firebase offers, which you presumably didn't do in 100 lines of code:
1) Full user management services, including registration and password recovery
2) Extremely fine-tuned access control per resource
3) Complete, tested front-end libraries for AngularJS, Backbone, and other popular frontend libraries.
4) Much more reliability than socket.io in providing cross-platform, cross-mobile real-time messaging (believe me I've used and tested socket.io). socket.io may or may not work on a given platform, and it's no longer a very active project, either.
5) Full admin panel for database, including real-time data updates.
Look, for a chat app, you're absolutely correct that Firebase may be overkill. But very few of us that rely on Firebase for applications are limiting ourselves to chat apps.
That said, I'm not happy about this acquisition. And this is probably the last time I'll be burned like this by a PaaS company. I saved a lot of time by going with Firebase (much more than 100 lines of code) but I'm questioning whether it was worth it.
PS: I didn't downvote, although I was tempted after reading your "Why not learn" remark. I think you're right in the end that open source is the best solution, but you're very wrong to assume that people are using Firebase because they can't quite figure out how to make a 100-line Node app.
Yes, it's picking back up now, but for a while it languished (half of 2013 with no commits, for example).
Also, check out the number of issues, some of which are pretty significant (although there are tons of ridiculous ones there, too). But if they're catching up -- and they appear to be -- that's great. It's a great project.
Don't forget about persistence. Creating a horizontally scalable database isn't likely to be a trivial matter. Somehow I don't think Twitter Bootstrap is going to be much help there.
Firebase has solved many harder problems than you and I are ever likely to have to deal with and they deserve full credit for that.
When building our realtime platform we quickly realised socket.io fell over spectacularly with serious traffic, and that all other hefty realtime services did not use it.
There has been lots of movement with the bigger release but nothing that has interested us in going back to it.
Well the memory leaks and approach to fallback connections led to it being more sensible to roll our own.
We've only needed to handle concurrent connections in the 1-10k range though.
There are really better c++ and erlang implementations we've investigated but won't pull those off the shelf till needed.
Obviously there's loads of great realtime-as-a-service offerings like Firebase and Pusher that make sense for a lot of use cases, just not ours.
We were always uncomfortable with relying on a third party for a core aspect of infrastructure, and this acquisition introduces uncertainty that we don't have to worry about.
The solution I've come up with is a pledge to release the source code if the product dies.[1] We've done this at Floobits, and it makes our users' lives less stressful.[2]
Nice to see someone else viewing pledges as a potential solution.
Something I think would make this even better, is if the pledges were standardised, so they followed some mutually agreeable guidelines. I had a go at doing this here:
I have it in place on my app (https://nachapp.com), and plan it include some/all of the pledges on future products I launch. Haven't yet come in contact with any other founders who are up for including it on their product... but if you like the idea and want to help improve the draft (even if it's just for the "long-term service" pledge), feel free to get in touch.
I have worked at startups that people could believe would fail. We used source code escrow services that release the code to customers if we went out of business. Any of them would have been free to open-source.
Little incentive? Even assuming sociopathic tendencies, it doesn't make sense to renege on the pledge and be branded a money-grubbing liar. The internet has a long memory, and people would not trust you in the future.
How about the pain-in-the-butt that is organizing, packaging, and releasing an organic network & development environment when you have other bigger things on your plate? I'm sure there are a few companies here and there with everything already nicely packaged. Yet, most places I've worked, it would be a herculean effort to pull the tangled jungle that is the internal network & development environment into one halfway-functional package.
It's less than ideal, but it is usually extremely low on the list of priorities as well as virtually untestable, unless the business model involves a large number of functionally identical VLAN's.
Also, names of people are usually not very strongly attached to products.
Who said anything about organizing or packaging? Just put the code up on Github with a reasonable license and walk away. Running and maintaining is of course still a problem, but you can hardly expect a company that is out of business to do that.
I completely agree that open sourcing the project does not guarantee that the project will continue to function. I also think that after a company goes out of business they have no responsibility to keep their project functioning. Once they open source it, anyone is free to put in the work to keep it going and I can't think of a better guarantee a company could reasonably give.
"One thing we do want to make clear: Svpply is not going away. We’ll continue to bring our users new products each day"
And if you follow the comments you'll see that some believe that these promises aren't even meant to be long term. So, simply, we would be stupid to bank on it.
Congratulations to the team, though! It shows a great and determined effort, something I greatly admire. And hopefully a means of maintaining trust will emerge.
In general it could be taken as a legally binding statement so if they are bought out and shut down there would be an avenue to pursue with the new owners.
The couple of small companies that I have worked for that had such a pledge took it seriously. They would hand source for every release over to an escrow company ensuring availability after company death.
It's not plausible because insolvent / bankrupt companies have the option to walk away from onerous contracts if it is in the interests of the debtors not to honour them. In this case, the idea of open sourcing the software UPON bankrupcy could destroy any remaining value left in the business (value of IP) which would otherwise be realisable to distribute to debtors.
I know some folks at Basho where they do just that with Riak, a high-availability distributed database. It's not an unworkable strategy, and clients know the product's not going to vanish out from under them.
Putting the source in escrow is a much better -- and more enforceable -- option than a mere pledge. This places the ability to release into the hands of a third party who is obligated to do so in the event that the conditions are met.
Being acquired by Google almost solves the dilemma in that statistically you can be nearly certain that whatever product or service a newly acquired company provides will be a dead project within 2 years.
I know that the acquirees are saying otherwise in this case (and Google is surely saying the same to them), and they might be right this time, but "nothing will change" is virtually always the line, until it suddenly isn't.
FWIW, I'm not even knocking Google (or Firebase) for this state of affairs; just noting that anyone paying attention will have seen this play out dozens of times in a way that is unpleasant in the medium to long term for anyone relying on the acquired company's technology.
Good point. As a startup owner myself, I somehow feel more comfortable depending on startups than on BigCo's (hence the rant), but maybe you're right that that's more emotional than rational.
I'm an engineer on Cloud SQL. Support is much, much different from the wider Google reputation in Cloud[1]. We have a long leash to talk directly to people, and we do: Cloud SQL team, at least, monitors the google-cloud-sql tag on Stack Overflow and replies with help when possible. If you pay, you get telephone access to support reps who have a bunch of experience, and when they can't get something done themselves (rare), they can and do file bug tickets with the engineering team directly to get issues resolved.
We are developers and you are developers, and we're all trying to work towards making cool things :) I don't see that changing any time soon, everyone from in Cloud from Urs down gets it. We have to earn your trust, and we do that be providing the best product we can, interacting in communities directly, providing great support, and not creating vendor lock-in. I wouldn't work on this team if we didn't do those things, because I believe in them as being necessary parts much as you do.
[1] I can't speak to the rest of the company because I don't have experience with it, but I had very good support experience with Play too, so it's my hope that support in general at Google has turned a significant corner in recent years.
I appreciate the hardwork you guys are putting in. But what you are saying is tangential to what parent wants. parent wants a committed vision/plan from google towards customer support. Allowing developers to talk to customers is all cool but what's required is commitment from google as a company to invest in customer support resources.
So, when my Google Apps is down, I don't want to geek out and talk to an engineer on the various technical issues. I want it back, up and running asap.
Speaking as a former Google Cloud customer (App Engine), while I had my gripes, the one you cite wasn't one of them. They already provide what you're looking for in my experience.
Isn't the same true of firebase as a company as well? Even pre-acquisition, all you need is for them to bring in an outside CEO who wants to monetize their userbase to screw things up.
> Google is known to not give a damn about paying customers (ref: all the Google Apps customers who lose their email (for whatever reason) and get redirected to a FAQ page with answers to unrelated questions).
Just in case any Googlers are reading: you have a contact form for adsense questions that rejects my email address because my real name has "Cocks" as a part of it.
We've had a lot of vendors, like Firebase, approach us at Poll Everywhere over the years. Despite how awesome they are as people, a company, and the huge problems they solve, I've always avoided it getting in bed with any vendor for something that I think is fundamental to a realtime web application. As a result, we developed our own realtime web framework at http://firehose.io, open sourced it under the MIT license, and made ourselves immune to these circumstances.
>That's a pretty big risk to take as a startup that fully depends on Firebase for their data storage.
Fully depending on any third party for any important part of your business is a risky strategy. If you're contracting out something as core as data storage, you'd better have a good plan B regardless of the provider's economic situation.
That's an excellent observation. I often feel that in the rush to acquisition the future of the product line can get lost. For example, one of the previous non-profits I worked with used myfamily.com for communications. Myfamily.com was bought out by Ancestry.com not too long ago, and progress on the MyFamily site - a completely separate but corollary product line - stagnated until they simply ended the product's run with just a few week's warning. After a while, when the acquired company's goals no longer apply for the new parent - or when they simply become too much of a hassle - they are simply left to twist in the wind.
Just an fyi in case you weren't trying to snipe on purpose, but there haven't been any data loss "issues" (e.g. stupid decisions by Google) with Apps for several years now.
That said, if I were using Firebase I'd be concerned, too. Google is well known as a place startups go to die, or morph into something The Borg wants rather than something aligned with the startup's original vision and the expectations of their paying customers.
But still, I just started using Firebase, and this news makes it clear to me that I should move off them as soon as I can. Firebase was an interesting technology supplier: When they were a small company, I could count on it that as a customer, I would count. Google is known to not give a damn about paying customers (ref: all the Google Apps customers who lose their email (for whatever reason) and get redirected to a FAQ page with answers to unrelated questions). Google is also known to Be Evil: I'm not sure I dare waiting until the terms change such that my user's data is subject to googlebot scanning.
Firebase's business model is aligned with my interests: the more users I have, the more I (hopefully) earn, so the more I pay Firebase. I strongly doubt, however, that Google is buying Firebase because they think they can get very rich selling Firebase subscriptions. It's either going to turn out a acquihire, or it is some part of a grand ecosystem plan. Acquihire means they'll pull the plug sooner or later, grand ecosystem plan means vendor lock-in. While I'm happy to be locked in to the services of a small independent business, I'd think twice before becoming entirely dependent on a company that could lose me as a customer and not even notice the slightest impact on their bottom line.
I know all of the Firebase guys are reading this, and I don't mean to piss on your parade. I'm certain you're not lying when you say that things are only going to get better. But I'm also certain that your jobs don't depend on that anymore, and when higher-ups decide to move the big boat's direction, Firebase might be over sooner than any of us wants it to.
That's a pretty big risk to take as a startup that fully depends on Firebase for their data storage.