Comment by randall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randall | Hacker News Reader

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I'm scared of meteor, no offense, partly because of its funding structure. It's a startup, but I think one thing I haven't been clear on is their licensing scheme, and how to deal with them if they die, etc.

While I'd actually love to use meteor as the foundation of our company, I feel like the risk of being burned by acqu-hire'd / the team burning out is really great. Raising $11.2mm means you basically have to win, and I'm not familiar with other companies who, as a startup, raised $10mm+ on the potential of their framework. I mean they have to be valued at $100mm already, right? So basically this is a billion or bust kind of company.

And yes, the founders are super talented, and helped build Facebook and Asana's realtime infrastructure, so they know what they're doing... i guess I'm just expressing my overall fear of using a framework with such a funding structure / worried about them getting evil down the line. I understand it's MIT so folks could fork and continue, but something just feels weird.

I'd love others to please come set me straight / offer alternative views of the world.

[meteor founder]

One of the reasons we raised a large series A (and from Andreessen in particular, who are incredibly skilled and patient) was to create certainty and confidence in the platform.

The round ensures that we can work on Meteor for several years without having worry about building a product or finding another line of revenue to stay alive. It lets us build a core engineering focused on the platform, so we can get to 1.0 as fast as possible. And it takes the risk of an acquihire right off the table -- the round was too big for that to make sense anymore.

We talk about some of this on our blog: http://meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors-new-112-million-de...

Cool! Well, good luck. I'll just be a late adopter this technology cycle and hope it doesn't burn me. :)

I fully agree with your mentality. When dealing with any technology for a business venture, you have to worry about the landscape a few years out. This happens to large companies too: for example, Microsoft axing Silverlight or Apple axing Xserve. All of these thoughts are compounded by the fact that they haven't reached critical mass (lower resistance).

As for the acqu-hire concern, I'd hope that by that point the community would be strong enough to sustain open-source development. I don't have a good sense for the community, and I suspect that the funding affects the culture. But like you said, I definitely wouldn't bet on the project moving past an acqu-hire

Isn't it all completely open source?

I just peeked at the source, and it says it's MIT licensed, but without the BDFL[1], would we see progress in the spirit its intended?

I worry about this with Angular too, but given that Google has obvious areas of synergy, I'm way less concerned about its doom.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life

Maybe, but they probably have 5 years of cash, so I personally wouldn't worry about it. There can be a new BFDL should the unthinkable happen, so long as the code is open source.

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