
A Sad Announcement - dkarapetyan
https://www.omniref.com/blog/2016/12/21/a-sad-announcement/
======
ChuckMcM
This is sad, and a bit perplexing.

According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round
([https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity))
and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better
than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github
doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last
couple of years and add their biological distinctiveness to Github[1]. Or
Atlassian integrating it with Jira so that your kanban notes can be attached
to code as you're developing a sprint.

[1] Yes that is an old Borg reference.

~~~
timr
Hi. Founder here.

I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite,
actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style,
"why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this
sort of stuff.

The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They
may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they
usually come with...terms. Which may or may not be good. There's also no
guarantee that an acquired product will continue to exist post-acquisition.

Anyway, if enough people are interested, we're considering open-sourcing the
annotation tool. I'd like to see that live on.

~~~
pducks32
Hey, I don't know what kind of mental state you are in but I imagine your
feeling pretty bummed so just wanted to say that I loved OmniRef and you made
an incredible product. And though it's shutting down, you are successful. You
did what very few people have the courage or ability to do: you started a
company. So I can't wait to see what you do next. And I hope you can look back
at OmniRef with good memories and keep your head up.

~~~
timr
Thanks, we really appreciate it.

------
Sanddancer
This would have been a better project, and had probably gotten a lot more
traction, had it provided plugins for the big editor suites -- eclipse, visual
studio, etc. As the project stood, it's neat, but at the same time, it's an
impedence mismatch. You can't just annotate in your environment of choice, you
have to go into a browser window to view the same code you have open in
another window and see if there are any annotations. There's a place for
something like it, but it needs to be a lot more intimate with how people
already work in order for it to get any sort of needed traction.

~~~
timr
Founder here. Yes, this is absolutely true. Problem is, _one_ editor
integration doesn't cut it. Or even two. The editor world is balkanized, and
even targeting the "most common" tools wasn't enough. Early adopters are
probably more varied in their editor use than the general developer
population.

More importantly, that was just one feature in a pile of other "must have"
features that people said they needed. It was on the roadmap, but we never got
around to it.

------
nemild
I'm sorry to hear the news - code annotation is something we need more of,
especially for teaching and debating different design choices. I remember your
posts on how MRI/Ruby worked from a few years back, which were always fun -
and something that I thought other open source projects would have benefited
from.

~~~
timr
Thanks, I appreciate the kind words.

------
sapeien
Stupid question: what does Omniref do that can't be done with source code
comments? Comments are readable by anyone in any editor and do not require
external tools. They are co-located to the relevant lines of code by being
part of the source, and are as portable as the code itself. My first
impression is that it is a solution seeking a problem.

~~~
throwaway161220
The problem seems to be post-commit code review or something like that. I
don't know if they did, but I hope they used git-notes which has been in git
core for a while now.

------
Arubis
I'm sorry to see this. Before the pivot towards annotation, I used Omniref
heavily for its excellent Ruby documentation access; while I hadn't used the
newer featureset, I have very fond memories.

------
wasd
Would you consider open sourcing some of your work on Ruby analysis?

~~~
timr
Unfortunately, the docs site code is...elaborate, and I don't think anyone
could replicate the current site without a ton of effort from us. I don't see
us open-sourcing that.

~~~
jordigh
I don't understand this. It's not like anyone's asking you to make it easier.
A code dump, useless as it may seem, is better than no code than at all. A
code dump doesn't mean you owe anything to anyone.

~~~
niij
He doesn't owe anyone a code dump either.

~~~
jordigh
Sure, but he seems to not want to do it because it involves work. It doesn't
involve work[1]. Just dump it, in whatever state it is.

\--

[1] Well, other than perhaps and upload to bitbucket or github and slapping a
LICENSE file on it, probably. It shouldn't involve any _maintenance_ or
_development_ work, is what I mean.

~~~
niij
As discussed in other threads, he would have to go through the entire code
base and determine licensing of all code he was using, talk to investors about
being allowed to release, and strip out any confidential information. I
honestly wouldn't hassle with it if my company just went belly-up, but it
would be nice if it happened :)

I did find out about Git notes through this thread, which seems interesting.

------
ElijahLynn
Would you consider open sourcing your work?

------
dkarapetyan
I posted this because I needed a code annotation tool to help me understand
some C code and I remembered Omniref. I'm sad to see it disappear like this. I
hope they will open source the annotations so that others can host it.

My use case isn't anything fancy. I just want to understand what tail is doing
behind the scenes with inotify so that I can implement it in another language
but I haven't found a rigorous enough outline of tail in pseudo-code to
translate it. So now I'm just fighting with it in Vim and VSCode to strip away
all the baggage that C forces onto a problem to get to the meat of the actual
solution.

I think we all gain when code is more understandable and don't have to
individually reverse engineer things to transport the lessons from one code
base into another. I thought crowd sourcing the annotation process was an
interesting take by Omniref. Maybe it was ahead of its time.

------
throwaway161220
If this has been using core git's notes[1] feature, then there's nothing to
export from the site. But as export is mentioned in the announcement, it seems
unlikely.

[1] [https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-
notes.h...](https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-notes.html)

------
zump
Interesting.. I had the idea of code annotation as a service, but gave it up
when I saw this was already out there.

------
murgleburgle
Has anyone used both this and Code Genius' annotation, and can offer a
comparison?

------
gravypod
This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that
you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source
control. I feel really bad for all the companies that have to jump through
hoops to get _their_ data rescued from this company.

It also sucks to loose such a smart company. I wish they had built their
solutions as a self hosted system so that people could still use their
obviosuly outstanding work.

~~~
timr
_" This is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software,
that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and
source control."_

Omniref founder here. Please try not to think this way, particularly if you're
a small team. I realize that this is kind of an impossible request (especially
given the source), but one of the things that makes it _immensely_ difficult
to start a software tools company is the unwillingness of developers to use
hosted tools, particularly if those tools are new and/or different.

When you're a small team, you can only do so many things at once. Supporting
hosted users, even in the best-case scenario, takes a lot of time and effort.
It's (sometimes) worth it if you can land bigger clients who are willing to
pay a premium for that effort, but often those bigger clients won't pay until
you have a reputation with smaller teams, or they require lots of custom
development that takes even more of your time. So you have a chicken-and-egg
problem. It's not impossible to make it work, but it's harder than it should
be.

If you're running a small/medium team, try to realize that innovation can only
exist in this area if we're willing to support startups when they're younger.
I've personally used lots of startups' services over the years for my dev
work. Some succeeded, others failed, but _trust_ has never been an issue.

~~~
Sanddancer
Yes, because tools hosted elsewhere have the problem your shutdown is
exemplifying. A definite expiration date /sucks/. Even if it is a month out,
that means having to do a lot of retooling to pull out all the bits and pieces
that have been built in that rely on the third party. Were it a hosted
solution, a transition plan could be made that isn't a mad rush to make sure
all the data that's in those annotations is saved once the lights go out.

------
dang
Please don't be snarky toward a fellow user.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13281887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13281887)
and marked it off-topic.

Edit: the comment was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13282118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13282118).
My mistake; undetached.

~~~
ianai
I meant no offense. I love Star Trek and somehow that felt like a great
analogy.

~~~
dang
Ok! Sorry for misreading you. I've put the comment back where it was.

~~~
ianai
Thank you. I felt pretty bad about coming off as being snarky.

~~~
Frondo
dang, ianai, _this_ is why I love HN.

Please keep up the good work forever.

