Google is no longer sponsoring Fastlane | Hacker News Reader

Google is no longer sponsoring Fastlane

mastodon.social

140 pointsprof1847 comments

So Google owns the IP but doesn't support the maintainers that do all the work and keep it running. They take the credit, the value of the brand and do nothing.

Can't the maintainers do a fork, continue their work with a new name and then maybe start a foundation or something to attract money and support it? Fastlane is a very mission critical piece of software for many companies, I'm sure some of them would support it if it's an indie project and not a Google property.

Edit: there's actually a recent discussion about this and the idea of moving it to the Mobile Native Foundation. https://github.com/MobileNativeFoundation/discussions/discus...

It's an MIT license. Worrying about who "owns the IP" for an open source project when you could fork any time seems a little much.

MIT license doesn't transfer trademarks and patents.

I’m not familiar with open sourced code under MIT that is still protected by a patent. Can you share some examples of this?

In practice it means that development work still happens, and, and prebuilt redist binaries still get made, but only in countries that don't recognize software patents.

Technically not under MIT, but x264 and x265 are being developed despite the underlying technologies under it have patents.

For context, fastlane is “a tool for iOS and Android developers to automate tedious tasks like generating screenshots, dealing with provisioning profiles, and releasing your application.”

https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane

Google seems to have acquired(?) it in 2017: https://krausefx.com/blog/fastlane-is-joining-google I would guess this means they hired the lead developer(s) and funded a team to work on the project.

They were acquired by Crashlytics, who rebranded as Fabric, which was acquired by Twitter, then sold off to Google and merged with Firebase.

Oof I didn’t even know Google acquired fastlane, this is THE standard toolset for automating shipping iOS and Android apps, I’ve used it in every job I’ve had. I am sure Google is using it extensively internally as well. I am really hoping the maintainers can get some money for the value they provide. I would also hope Apple could provide some bucks towards this tool it is really necessary for making iOS delivery not a total nightmare.

I've just started using it in my shop, and the tool is quite magical. A lot of work has gone into it, to the level where it will automatically search its own GitHub issues when crashes occur and provide relevant stackoverflows in a lot of cases. iOS provisioning specifically is horribly complicated, and the ad-hoc (pun intended) way my org was doing code signing before is archaic in comparison. Thanks Josh and the other Fastlane contributors for making such an awesome tool!

Is anyone doing something like this for webapps?

Not required. With mobile app development one of the biggest pain points is deployments to the app stores, it's a little easier with Android but on iOS it's an absolute pain in the ass and fastlane makes it a much more tolerable experience.

When it comes to webapps it's a much more straightforward process. A simple github action that deploys your site to S3 would suffice. On mobile you have a billion certs, profile, and other crap to deal with and fastlane handles all of that.

I don't think fastlane will have trouble finding backers and sponsors, because like you said many huge companies rely on it for deploy their iOS and Android apps, even when I was deploying a side project I used them. It's a crucial tool mobile devops and there is really no equivalent.

There are still maintainers, Google's just not paying them.

Google gets credit for Fastlane and owns the IP, while a small army of contributors do all the work for free...

> Google gets credit

Except many don’t know Google owned it

The title is sensationalized, dang can we get an edit? Fastlane absolutely has maintainers and is not abandoned. It's just that Google isn't paying for maintenance now.

EDIT: I'm aware the original twoot says this verbatim, it's just not correct

If you really care and / or want to make a positive difference, email the staff at hn@ycombinator.com. There is too much activity for mods to patrol it all, and posts of this nature don't meet the HN standard for curious conversation.

The staff are responsive and eager to help, all it takes is reaching out via the recommended channel (email).

5 months of no releases for this kind of project seems pretty abandoned

When did you check last? This release is from before the HN story was submitted:

    Google abandoned Fastlane, it has no maintainers currently (mastodon.social)
    93 points by prof18 4 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments

https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane/releases/tag/2.212.0

    joshdholtz released this 9 hours ago

Does software need to be released every week? Would calc.exe on Windows be better for 52 releases a year vs. making it add two numbers together and then stopping?

It would when you manage an IDE that’s updated at least quarterly with it

2.211.0 came out November 12, which is about 3 months ago, and 2.212.0 came out 9 hours ago. In the linked Mastodon thread, Josh mentions that he's had a new addition to his family, making things a bit slower, and it's already pretty common for releases to slow down during the holiday months (for instance VS Code doesn't have a December release by policy).

I never got into using Fastlane, but it had some cool stuff. I just tend to usually work alone, and Fastlane didn't actually help me out, because of the workflow I adopt. I don't actually do much automated stuff.

This is a danger with any of these dependencies. I do know that there's a whole ecosystem around Fastlane, and I think that some companies even make money from it, so I'd hope that it is not actually allowed to rot on the vine.

It should be news when Google commits to not abandon something nowadays!

But even then, Stadia happened. So all bets are off.

Nonsense. Still maintained with multiple committers, and even a new release.

How can Google own the IP if this is open source

IP =/= copyright

See Audacity. Open source but the name is registered trademark and owned by the Muse Group

https://www.audacityteam.org/copyright/

https://github.com/audacity/audacity

Or Blender also another open source project but registered trademark

https://www.blender.org/about/logo/

https://github.com/blender

Krita too

https://krita.org/en/item/krita-trademark-policy/

https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita

There are countless examples

Indeed, Linux is probably the most famous. It's trademarked because someone else tried to trademark "Linux" and then shake down vendors for 10%. It went to court, the trademark troll lost and the trademark itself was assigned to Torvalds.

It's now administered by the Linux Mark Institute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mark_Institute

That made me wonder, UNIX is also trademarked https://unix.org/trademark.html

And there are handful of OSes registered as UNIX Certified https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

Yet there is no single "UNIX OS"

The AT&T Unix is probably "the" Unix, if there is one, but the name got sold eventually to The Open Group which licenses it to compliant systems.

So it's now a bit more like x86 (family of similar products that work somewhat similarly, though x86 doesn't need a license any more) rather than Pentium (a product or range from a specific company).

Let me add a very relevant anecdote of the difference between those things.

Kurento the project is Apache-2 open-source, you'll find all its source code here: https://github.com/Kurento/kurento

its website was kurento .org but the trademark of the name (and the domain) is owned by Twilio, who recently had the gesture of redirecting all accesses from this domain to their own, without prior warning. No replies to emails, or reasons stated. Not that they needed one though, as they are indeed the owners and can do whatever they want. Just a nice "contribution" they made to OSS, it seems.

Wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't a "let's send all the random domains we have lying around to the main site" bulk change and whoever did it didn't realise and if anybody's reading the emails they have no idea where to start finding out who that was.

I mean, that's not exactly great either if true, but I think it's just as much a possibility as this being intentional.

I would have hoped that in such a case, talking it over email and/or phone if needed would be a way to restore the domains that were actually in use. But apparently, emails were sent and never responded. In any case we took the chance to move it all so now it's a solved problem. The manners weren't great, tho.

Right, the only thing I'm arguing here is that it's plausible that every step, including the lack of a reply to the emails, could easily have been down to "the organisation was insufficiently organised."

Note that I've had to run around helping projects deal with both that sort of situation and the sort where the company was deliberately screwing over the project out of active malice (take a bow, Nagios Enterprises) and this definitely smells like the former based on what little information I have.

But being on the receiving end of such an event tends to suck baseballs through a carbon nanotube straw either way, and believe me that you have all of my sympathy and my nerding out trying to analyse how said event came to pass was, just, well, just as much a result of having waded through similar swamps previously myself as the sympathy :)

The irony here is that Google owns the copyright for Fastlane, and the notion that copyright doesn't exist in open source is the real misnomer here.

Google holds the copyright and they choose to license their IP under an open source license. You could be thinking of public domain.

So, maintainers can just fork it under different name?

Just call it fasterlane or betterlane lol

Or as is the fashion currently, librelane

Or autobahn

If the (ex-)maintainers work for google, they'd probably not do it. But, legally, they could.

The complaint is that Google isn't paying for anyone to work on this tool. Forking the project seems unlikely to change that.

As a side note, the requirements in open-source licenses (such as redistributing source yourself, giving attribution, etc.) are only enforceable because of intellectual property. Someone owns the copyright, and often has contributors assign the copyright to them, and they then own the IP. The license grants you conditional authorization to distribute the software, provided you comply with certain requirements. If you fail to do that, it's the copyright holder that can really sue.

Twitter is the original link, this mastodon seems to be a mirror, so why not link there? https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1627315332716150785

Josh Holtz, the main maintainer provides more useful context in this mastodon thread than on Twitter. I can't even follow what's going on in the Twitter thread, seems way less useful. Maybe that's not surprising considering how they've messed everything up there lately.

The truth is somehow, techies here have become somewhat allergic to Twitter.

This would be a problem if Fastlane was closed source. Thankfully it is open-source and like with open-source communities before, they can maintain it themselves. That is the point of open-source.

So this is a non-story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com