

Alky Postmortem - daeken
http://daeken.com/alky-postmortem

======
aditya
What makes this story even cooler is that Cody was probably 19 when it
happened. Thanks for sharing!

~~~
pvg
It's certainly an interesting read although it's hard to see what is 'cool'
about the outright unethical bits and the author's curious belief that if you
don't personally gain (much) from taking someone's money for things you don't
deliver, you're not actually ripping them off. Perhaps a framing more towards
apology rather than 'useful advice for you!' might have been better, in
places.

~~~
daeken
Perhaps I could've phrased things better, but I hope I made it clear that I do
feel that we ripped people off. We hoped to make it clear that the Sapling
Program was intended to support the project and that it was entirely possible
that nothing at all would come of it, but even so it really sucked to see
things go down the way they did.

We made a lot of mistakes, but if nothing else, I've learned from them and
done what I can to not hit them again. I feel bad for the people who supported
us and ended up not getting their money's worth, and I never want to do that
to a customer again.

------
allenbrunson
were you working for the Michael Robertson that started mp3.com, linspire, et
al? if so, he already had his _own_ shady past to worry about. here's one of
his many enemies:

[http://kevincarmony.blogspot.com/2009/11/gizmo5-sipphone-
sha...](http://kevincarmony.blogspot.com/2009/11/gizmo5-sipphone-shareholders-
beware-of.html)

~~~
daeken
I was there near the beginning of the MP3tunes days, which has its own
insanely shady past (much of which I can't talk about, sadly). I can say that
there are few people in the world I trust less than MR, having seen how much
he's done to hurt people, especially his employees and business partners.

Edit: Misread your question. Yes, it's the same Michael Robertson.

~~~
nitrogen
Maybe someone should create a group for hackers who formerly worked for an MR-
started company.

------
GoboGobo
I wonder what the reasoning was behind closing down the open-source project
the way he did.

~~~
daeken
To be quite honest, I don't recall why we closed it the way we did. In
retrospect, I can come up with few poorer ways of going about it, so I really
don't see how it ever made sense. It's one of the biggest mistakes we made,
IMO, even though I don't believe it directly related to the project's failure.

------
jbellis
why not just link with libwine? it may be ugly, but there's a lot of people
moving it forward, and leveraging that seems like a huge win.

~~~
alnayyir
> libwine

Slow and opaque.

~~~
allenbrunson
having not used wine, i'll take your word for the 'slow' part. but what about
it is 'opaque'?

~~~
alnayyir
Doesn't play well with others.

------
alnayyir
As noted in Daeken's post the source can be found on github here:

<http://github.com/callen/Alky-Reborn>

I am currently keeping that up there for two reasons:

1\. Safe-keeping

2\. So that I could read over the code from my friend's house on Christmas.

I would like to be able to begin development by New Year's, if anyone would
like to discuss/collab on the code I welcome all comers.

~~~
allenbrunson
i'm intrigued by this project. input a windows game, output a macosx
executable. i have to admit that i'd love to have such a thing.

but i'm skeptical. what's to keep this from turning into a huge ungainly
decades-long slog? given the history of the WINE project, that's what i'd
assume is looming on the horizon.

~~~
daeken
There's really little to keep it from turning into that. In fact, I don't see
any way it _couldn't_ be decades long, if the plan is real windows
compatibility. However, I think that the points I detailed under the potential
new Alky design would keep things considerably simpler (though I think it's
unlikely anyone would pick up the design).

As I said, I think the absolute key is a focus on maintainability. Everything
comes from there.

