Comment by namecast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by namecast | Hacker News Reader

I was going to write a message here congratulating this guy, as I love the concept - but then I realized he'd emailed me a few months back, blogged about us, then ripped off our product after we ignored him, and poorly at that.

1) On April 19th, Steve wrote this blog post mentioning us, Namecast: http://blog.steve.org.uk/i_was_beaten_to_the_punch__but_felt...

2) At around the same time Steve sent me a personal email doing market research on the concept of Git-backed DNS. I didn't respond because, well, it was a bit of a clunky first way to ping someone. Still no problem, though - who hasn't sent a random stranger an awkward email before, right?

3) He then decided to build a competing product - and steal our messaging?! Seriously, go to http://www.namecast.net right now, check out our above the fold copy, and then check out dns-api.com. "Imagine if updating your DNS records was as easy as running "git push"." Really, Steve? Really?

This is where things go in my mind from "hey, two DNS guys had the same idea about Git and DNS, neat!" to "this dude can't create his own ideas so has decided to steal our copy and cargo cult copy our product."

Luckily Steve isn't very good at DNS or handling traffic, so his servers have fallen down and people are complaining about his feature set, so instead of complaining too hard:

For those of you who want a provider who's site won't fall over after a tiny crush of HN traffic, check out http://www.namecast.net.

We've also got working SRV, TXT and alias records - some of you have noticed dns-api.com doesn't - as well as geoIP and native IPv6 amongst other things, and as good members of the open source community, we're contributors to the open source geodns project (written in Go by Ask Bjorn Hansen, it powers the global NTP pool - so if you've got software that talks to pool.ntp.org, like say, ntpdate, it's talking to a server running geodns.)

mic drop

--afsheenb

As a pre-emptive note for other HN'ers:

1) I'm not annoyed that Steve's built a competing product. That would be like the developers of Squid being annoyed that Varnish exists, or lighttpd and Nginx, or.... you get the picture. Competition in the free market and especially amongst software providers is good and healthy, and saying otherwise is tantamount to saying that software is sacred. That way lies patent madness. Besides, LuaDNS and I'm sure others have similar products. I was actually really excited about this, as it validates our market, theoretically - until I recognized the name and visited the site.

2) I'm furious that Steve blogged about us, mailed us directly - so he damn sure knows about us and our product - and then directly lifted our copy and messaging, and is now presenting this as an original concept on a Show HN post. That's where this all falls apart. Just - not cool, buddy. Not. Cool.

If Steve replies, I'm bookmarking this :D

Please do bear with me .. 23:50 here and I need sleep.

1. Good :)

2. What you call "lifting our copy" I call "Making the obvious comparison" - given the implementation. If it were a whole page, rather than one identical sentence, I'd be more apologetic.

That said I am genuinely sorry that this has caused annoyance, and I didn't mean to imply this was a genuinely new idea - just a new implementation of a good idea.

Hopefully this is .. better?

That

I'm not sure if refuting point by point will be seen as a sign of good faith, or getting bogged down in the details.

As you say multiple people have had similar ideas, including people such as LuaDNS.

That said:

1. If you check back you'll see my blog posts mention you, and LuaDNS, and others. But yes I've heard of you. e.g. The post previous to the one you link to says, in short "People will pay for Git + DNS" - http://blog.steve.org.uk/some_things_on_dns_and_caching.html - Which clearly gives the motivation, and before I saw you.

2. I guess we'll never know how that could have changed things.

3. Genuinely not intended to be anything other than the obvious thing that popped into my mind - I will absolutely get that changed in the next while.

As for the server falling over, it's a little heavyweight on the front-end, using some Perl CGIs, so the fact it died when having only 512Mb of RAM isn't a surprise.

You'll see that I've just setup both dns-api.org, and dhcp.io, both of which are handling decent amounts of traffic - and both of which are free. I hope that I'm capable of doing DNS stuff.

I'm glad your service exists, I'm glad you implement all the records, but .. apart from the word-collision I'm not sure that I'm doing anything particularly bad here.

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