Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else remember back in 2012 when CloudFlare promised to open source their intermediary chain information?

>Going forward, in addition to releasing the directory of intermediate SSL certificates on Github, we plan on releasing our SSL bundler as a free service so you can package up your SSL certificates as efficiently as possible, even if you're not using CloudFlare. Just one more way we're working to make the web fast and safe.

http://blog.cloudflare.com/what-we-just-did-to-make-ssl-even...

I hate companies who lie about releasing stuff. If you look through CloudFlare's blog this isn't even the only example- they love promising to be open and give back to the community, but rarely do their actions match their words.

View on HN

And comments like this are why companies hate to say anything publicly!

If a company says "we plan to..." then odds are they are telling the truth. At the time of writing that is exactly what they were planning to do. It turns out that sometimes plans change. Or planned things take longer than initially planned for.

But of course if you ever say anything on the internet people treat it like a promise and then you get called a liar. This is why we can't have nice things.

If a person or organization says that they're going to do something, even if it's qualified as only being "planned", it is indeed a promise to act.

Reputable people and organizations who make such statements will then proceed to deliver. If they suspect they won't be able to, for whatever reason, then they'll be careful not to make such statements in the first place.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with holding people and organizations to a very high standard regarding what they've publicly claimed that they will or aim to do.

You seem to have an excessively narrow definition for planning. If I plan to go to the gym today and it turns out that I do not, would you really say that I broke a promise? Something else came up and I changed my plans. It's possible I lied to you when I told you about my plans, but that is not the same thing as breaking a promise.

Then companies should stop promising things if they are not sure when and if they can actually deliver.

https://github.com/holman/feedback/issues/534#issuecomment-4...

Valve takes the same approach.

>This is why we can't have nice things

More like this is why we can't have nice promises. Promises, on their own, are useless. Why should you get the PR boost from an openness promise if you don't actually end up fulfilling it? This is pretty much like false advertising, where you promise some aspects of a product and end up delivering something different. No matter your excuse, this is wrong and unfair to competitors.

But business is business and companies still end up making those weak promises to grab some more market share.

Because it wasn't a god damned promise!! There should be nothing wrong with saying "this is our current plan" and that plan changing down the road (when it makes sense to change).

Anyone who has ever worked on anything in their life knows that plans change. Sometimes plans change to something else that's better. Sometimes ideas that are great on paper don't work in practice and need to be scrapped. Sometimes a plan is a great idea but an unanticipated roadblock makes it impossible or prohibitively expensive to accomplish.

So yes. Companies can never say anything publicly until it's already done. And I think that's a god damned shame. So again I say, this is why we can't have nice things.

Of course plans change can change.

That said, we all know "that guy". You know, the slick "idea guy" marketer who always has grand plans but never follows through? Who jumps on any hot PR topic that gets him publicity? After a while, you sort of tune him out, because you know his plans never amount to anything.

I have no idea whether cloudflares efforts fall into this pattern. But I know enough companies that behave this way that I think I can safely say that not all corporate "plans" are announced with the intentions of actually following through on them.

Companies can never say anything publicly until it's already done. And I think that's a god damned shame.

Why?

We got distracted by other things and never got around to packaging up the packager in a way appropriate for public consumption. You will be happy to know that about a month ago we restarted that project and the team working on it is close to releasing it to the community.

I'll mention this internally. Thank you for the reminder (genuinely).

I'll see what I can do about getting this information open sourced.

[[UPDATE]] I'm hearing this is still planned, and we're aiming to get this out this coming summer. Internal projects have pushed this back a bit, apologies.

This is pretty silly.

They give back to the community and even offer free plans that are pretty damn useful.

With amount of growth they have experienced, you should be thankful that they are able to find time for anything at all at this point.

I've learned to not hold my breath when companies talk about releasing stuff (e.g. an API), especially when they say they're "working hard" on it...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com