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Comment by jamest | Hacker News Reader

[Firebase Founder] Hi Justin, we're pretty excited about leaving beta and think it's fairly significant. Building robust infrastructure isn't an easy task and this change is meant to signal that we're ready for primetime. I hope that comes across!

If you're worried about lock-in, I'd first try Firebase along with our AngularJS[1] or Backbone[2] bindings. You don't have to change the way you write your app and can switch Firebase our for another backend easily. We recognize that we're only going to win a developer's trust by building a reliable service with the best tools and fair pricing -- so this is what we're going to do

I'd love to dispel any concerns, please feel free to email me anytime (james at firebase)

[1] https://github.com/firebase/angularFire

[2] https://github.com/firebase/backfire

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Hi James, thanks for the thoughtful reply to my grumpy trolling.

I can at least tell you what would dispel my concerns:

1. Some kind of death-rattle clause. If your company doesn't make it or shuts down this service, all the code necessary to set up the service would be released under a permissive license, something like that.

2. The ability, even if it had a high cost ($100k a year or something crazy), to license the source to the engine that powers Firebase and deploy a modified version (obviously just for our own use).

I think those two things would mean that if I were making decisions on the technical direction of a company or large project, I wouldn't feel like Firebase might suddenly cause a major disruption in the future. At least if there were a major incident or insurmountable problem with the service, we could bring it in house and proceed without having to go back and re-engineer all the previous work.

I've seen worse on the internet :)

To answer your questions:

1. We put our code in escrow for very large customers. We are thinking about the best way to address the concerns of everyone else. Stay tuned.

2. This is coming. It'll be a little while.

Thanks again for your comments. Criticism helps us figure out where we need to improve.

I'd think you'd use a service like Firebase in much the same way people outsource IT infrastructure to the cloud. Eventually you reach a scale that it pays to bring the infrastructure in house. That might/might not happen with your product. Also, there's a lot of products where you're not going to care about 95% of the data in a few years anyway - trendy games maybe?

Anyway, I'm intrigued about the idea around Firefbase for allowing people to quickly start executing on their ideas and focus on what seems to matter a lot these days, the front-end.

I'm also appreciative of the AngularJS bindings....will definitely make me check this out...

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