
What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On - rosser
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/apple-pulls-plug-tech-company-runs/
======
mc32
The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its
doors or gets bought out.

Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow?
things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it,
except Wired wants to make money taking this tack.

I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd
be nice if companies shuttered gracefully, but it does not happen all the
time.

What are they saying in essence? Don't depend on closed source services? Don't
depend on non-creative commons Wired articles for your news as they may shut
down one day? People make a calculus. This option is closed source, but offers
this advantage. I know, as any business, they may disappear and I'm left
holding the bag, but I'm willing to take that chance, given the advantages.
This is also the case for open source software, but, yes, OSS has the
advantage that someone with sufficient need and resources could resurrect the
project.

Fine, they have a preference for open source. That's great. We could all hope
all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available
--with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.

~~~
nickysielicki
> Why is this so exceptional?

Because code isn't a good that spoils. When someone shuts their door to my
favorite restaurant, the presumption is that they were losing money, and
needed to close the doors. When my favorite SaaS service shuts down, it's the
same deal.

This is different. They're just being selfish because they got some money,
giving the middle finger to everyone. That same code is still sitting in a git
repo somewhere, and that's frustrating as hell to anyone that trusted them. It
would be no sweat off their backs to at least scale down support over a year
to let people transition.

But let's not place the blame on them. It's probably not their choice to fuck
over all of their users. I guarantee this is coming from Apple, and you should
all remember that when you line up to buy this new fancy 1 port macbook: Fuck
Apple, they don't give a shit about open source. They're
embrace/extend/extinguish just as Microsoft. They just operate on Unix so it
feels like they give us more.

It's okay though. Someone inside will realize they're sitting on a goldmine of
information on how to make good software, they'll leave the hellish work
environment that is Apple, write an open source version, and it will be
superior.

>We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools
that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.

There is no "short of that". Demand open source for everything you do. It's
not unreasonable. The modern computer ecosystem IS open source.

You are very much overstating the similarities from open source developers
disappearing and a closed source software company leaving you up to dry. One
can live on, and one has no hope.

~~~
dlu
Angry much?

You lost me with the "code isn't a good that spoils" line. It is a great
phrase, but perhaps you could re-explain?

~~~
jsprogrammer
A restaurant requires continuous inputs: fresh food, labor, electricity.

Code is a purely digital good. What was in the repo a few days ago could be
released at no ongoing cost to FoundationDB/Apple and it will stay exactly how
it was, forever.

~~~
r00fus
I disagree. Code gains technical debt over time, bugs are found, compatibility
with other libraries and the OS fray, security vulnerabilities are exposed,
and what were awesome features 6 months ago become commonplace or superseded
by the new awesome.

Essentially, code starts to rot after a while.

~~~
pc2g4d
Its utility diminishes as the difference between its original environment and
the current technical environment increases. However, given a replica of its
original intended environment (e.g. an OS image in a VM) the code will run
just as well as it always did.

So code does spoil. And it doesn't.

------
grrowl
"We have made the decision to evolve our company mission and, as of today, we
will no longer offer downloads." is the least respectful and most opaque
phrase I've ever heard. What would have been the risk of something more honest
and direct?

~~~
mik3y
Seriously. This is beyond crass. Not 2 months ago, I came _this close_ to
betting on and recommending FoundationDB. Today I would have been swimming in
a world of shit (not to mention wasted time) had I recommended these guys.

I'm never one to begrudge exits, but they blew this. Even if financial
circumstances meant they _had_ to turn down the product, there are way better
ways to do that before yanking everything and disappearing.

Dave Scherer, Dave Rosenthal: I hope you're stocking up for a long cozy
retirement at Apple. I honestly don't know how you expect to be trusted by a
faithful early adopter ever again.

------
mindcrash
Maybe something more is at play here than just the founders and team cutting
access to years of their work.

Could also be something to do with a certain company who doesn't like you to
have access to (certain) assets of their acquisition after it went through. I
mean, they did the same thing with TestFlight. janking Android support
directly after the acquisition (and closing it altogether a while later) and
Logic (yanking Windows support directly after the acquisition and making the
product OSX exclusive).

You could say Apple really is quite ruthless and basically acts like a asshole
when it comes to acquisitions, even though their CEO seems to be quite a nice
and gentle person (at least after work hours)

~~~
santosha
Let's not forget Siri.

------
joe_the_user
De rigueur comment: What happens when Apple buys a closed source company you
depend on.

------
S_A_P
It's odd that they imply foundation db has a strength in scalable performance
that other no sql databases do not which would be handy for financial
applications but then fail to mention apple pay as a potential use case.

------
Handwash
Despite the fact that this is not only happen in Apple specific case as the
title suggest and probably, a quite generalization of what Apple do to the
company it bought, the article raises a good point to carefully decide what
technology solution you use for your company.

We have to expect that any product that we used might come to an end someday,
and need to make sure that we at least have an escape plan for that.

------
makeitsuckless
At least Apple makes puts it out of its misery quickly, unlike the likes of
Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, who have been known to let products of acquired
companies live on like zombies before finally "sunsetting" them.

How often haven't we read the whole fake happy "we're so excited, but nothing
will change" press releases? Those have become a running joke.

~~~
ido
I much rather have 3 years to migrate away from google's "zombies" than having
the rug pulled out from under me overnight.

~~~
yaeger
Uh, how is this different? These zombies most likely will also offer no
support or security patches. Hence the term "zombie". The _only_ difference
here would be that you could possibly still download the last version from
their site which is not the case with FoundationDB.

As long as you have the latest version and you put it in your SCM or wherever
you want to keep these things, you are just as able to take 3 years to migrate
away from FoundationDB as you would be from one of these zombies.

At least with FoundationDB, as others have said, you actually know _now_ what
will happen in the future, with the zombie you might spend additional time
"sticking it out" before you realize they will stay dead. That would be time
you could have used to start the migration.

------
Alex3917
If Apple gets any bigger we're going to have to start worrying about them
buying Google and then shutting it down.

~~~
taspeotis
I imagine it's impossible in practice, but it's fun to entertain
theoretically. Right now it seems GOOG has a market cap of $383.11B and Apple
has $178B on hand [1].

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-
cash-178-bil...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-
cash-178-billion/)

~~~
meric
Google has $60b cash. Apple can borrow $205b, buy Google for $383b, use
Google's $60b cash to pay off the debt, with Apple ending up owing $145b. It's
not too unreasonable for a $718.66b company to be $145b in debt.

Alternatively, use a script and cash offer. Pay $178b in cash and the rest in
shares.

All of this is possible, but as Page & Brin own 56% of voting power so all
Apple would be getting is Google's income, but have no say to its decision
making process. I assume Page & Brin aren't selling.

Not really worth it for an extra $16b per year.

~~~
smitherfield
Pretty sure the FTC would not approve that merger, since it would give Apple a
monopoly on mobile device operating systems, and arguably "tech" in general.

------
AndrewKemendo
Same thing happened with the 13th Lab pointcloud SDK getting sucked into
Oculus. We also see it with developers getting sucked into Google/FB etc...

------
davidgerard
OPEN SOURCE, dudes. Protection from your vendor is why you need it.

This is something you learn after getting burnt by a vendor of
$L33T_TOOL_OF_THE_DAY a few times.

------
ademarre
The article cites CouchDB as how this kind of thing can play out differently
for open-source software. The first example that came to my mind was Oracle's
acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and the subsequent MySQL forks (e.g.
MariaDB). Of course, we still have MySQL today, and AFAIK it remains to be
seen what will happen to FoundationDB. I doubt Apple will kill it.

------
nitrogen
I'd still like to know what Apple is going to do with PrimeSense. Thanks to
that purchase, I have to rely on used Kinects for all of my depth sensing
needs.

------
awinder
If this acquisition was in any way related to Apple wanting to use this
product in-house -- call me massively confused. It really would be a mental
sickness if Apple were so insistent on using closed-source tech across the
organization, even while that is a very obscure line of thinking amongst it's
competitors in the cloud space. On the other hand, if Apple is acqui-hiring
these guys -- then why kill the download links instantly? So yeah, either way,
seems like a poorly handled situation

~~~
capkutay
Just because the tech companies we read about on hacker news rely on and
contribute to open source, doesn't mean that its a 'mental sickness' to use
proprietary products. There's good workloads for open source (Apple uses
hadoop/hbase heavily internally), and then theres unique proprietary
solutions.

~~~
awinder
The mental sickness wouldn't be using any proprietary software. The mental
sickness would be acquiring a closed source database and keeping the tech
closed source. Databases specifically seem to have a huge mindshare and usage
share around open source. And when conventional stores haven't fulfilled a
need, solutions like Cassandra, CouchBase, and Mongodb have been released as
open source software. I don't really think Apple has some unique data
persistence needs to require such an obscure path, if that is really what they
were doing

------
bobbles
The website doesn't even mention anything relating to the purchase from what I
can see [https://foundationdb.com/](https://foundationdb.com/)

Edit: Ah.. its on the community page:
[http://community.foundationdb.com/](http://community.foundationdb.com/)

------
pmorici
Were these people paying customers? If not what did they expect would happen.

~~~
freehunter
To combine this with another comment, free and closed source means that at
some point, many of those users will be massively disappointed. I can think of
very few exceptions.

~~~
meric
Google search engine is free and closed source?

Sure, some of us are disappointed with how our search data is treated, but the
disappointment for most generally ends at incognito mode, not that close to
'massive'.

That's quite a big exception.

~~~
pmorici
Everyone know how Google makes money though, through ads. A database company
doesn't have that option.

------
pje
> Like other NoSQL databases, FoundationDB offered a way to build databases
> that spanned hundreds or thousands of different servers, often housed in
> geographically distant data centers.

What?

> FoundationDB promised a way to provide scalability without sacrificing
> performance

Wait, what?

~~~
fineline
I understand that FoundationDB's main point of differentiation from other
NoSQL document DBs was support for transactional integrity across documents.
Others (i.e. all open-source options, AFAIK) support atomic transactions only
on a single document.

Sounds like the author had been told this, didn't quite get it, and mumbled
this stuff instead.

------
spectrum1234
"That leaves companies that depended on that software out of luck. And when
startups suffer, so does innovation."

Uhhh except that their existence outright is in itself innovation. Removing
their existence cannot reduce innovation since their initial existence
furthered it.

cliffs: article is dumb and author is an idiot. at least i think, i had to
stop reading the article.

~~~
geofft
... it reduces _future_ innovation, it doesn't undo past innovation.

