What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When Apple Buys a Company You Depend On

wired.com

74 pointsrosser49 comments

The same thing that happens when a service or product you depend on shuts its doors or gets bought out.

Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time. There is nothing special about it, except Wired wants to make money taking this tack.

I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever and it'd be nice if companies shuttered gracefully, but it does not happen all the time.

What are they saying in essence? Don't depend on closed source services? Don't depend on non-creative commons Wired articles for your news as they may shut down one day? People make a calculus. This option is closed source, but offers this advantage. I know, as any business, they may disappear and I'm left holding the bag, but I'm willing to take that chance, given the advantages. This is also the case for open source software, but, yes, OSS has the advantage that someone with sufficient need and resources could resurrect the project.

Fine, they have a preference for open source. That's great. We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.

> We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.

And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well.

So in essence we as humans would probably be better off expecting things to disappear instead of the opposite maybe? Not sure I can do that, but still, seems like a more fitting strategy.

> And even then, open source projects get abandoned all the time or get shut down as well.

I can continue improving an open source project that gets abandoned.

In theory anyone can, but only large projects tend to get picked up.

But the magic of free software is, if your business depends on it and you can hire someone to work on it, you can keep using that source code for as long as it makes business sense to.

I don't think they're saying anything in particular. The conclusions you take from it are yours.

I think they are trying to say something, especially when they add the 'apple' part. As if apple makes this especially egregious. I know, apple is the top dog to aim for in tech now, so they are a nice whipping boy.

Oooo, what happens when Oracle buys a company you depend on (Sun/ZFS). What happens when SAP buys a company you depend on. What happens when Cisco buys a company you depend on (any number of Hw companies). What happens when Amazon buys a company you depend on (robotics), what happens when a free software you depend on shuts down (TrueCrypt)

Wired is just capitalizing on an anti-apple wave. I'm not an apple fan, but, it's not as if they are much worse than others.

They could have just said "What happens when the products you depend on disappear?" But that's not sexy. It also does not fit their "narrative".

"I mean, it'd be nice if we could depend on things to be there forever"

When I read that, I immediately thought of craigslist, for some reason.

> Why is this so exceptional?

Because code isn't a good that spoils. When someone shuts their door to my favorite restaurant, the presumption is that they were losing money, and needed to close the doors. When my favorite SaaS service shuts down, it's the same deal.

This is different. They're just being selfish because they got some money, giving the middle finger to everyone. That same code is still sitting in a git repo somewhere, and that's frustrating as hell to anyone that trusted them. It would be no sweat off their backs to at least scale down support over a year to let people transition.

But let's not place the blame on them. It's probably not their choice to fuck over all of their users. I guarantee this is coming from Apple, and you should all remember that when you line up to buy this new fancy 1 port macbook: Fuck Apple, they don't give a shit about open source. They're embrace/extend/extinguish just as Microsoft. They just operate on Unix so it feels like they give us more.

It's okay though. Someone inside will realize they're sitting on a goldmine of information on how to make good software, they'll leave the hellish work environment that is Apple, write an open source version, and it will be superior.

>We could all hope all was open source but short of that, we use the tools that are available --with the understanding they could disappear tomorrow.

There is no "short of that". Demand open source for everything you do. It's not unreasonable. The modern computer ecosystem IS open source.

You are very much overstating the similarities from open source developers disappearing and a closed source software company leaving you up to dry. One can live on, and one has no hope.

Angry much?

You lost me with the "code isn't a good that spoils" line. It is a great phrase, but perhaps you could re-explain?

A restaurant requires continuous inputs: fresh food, labor, electricity.

Code is a purely digital good. What was in the repo a few days ago could be released at no ongoing cost to FoundationDB/Apple and it will stay exactly how it was, forever.

I disagree. Code gains technical debt over time, bugs are found, compatibility with other libraries and the OS fray, security vulnerabilities are exposed, and what were awesome features 6 months ago become commonplace or superseded by the new awesome.

Essentially, code starts to rot after a while.

Its utility diminishes as the difference between its original environment and the current technical environment increases. However, given a replica of its original intended environment (e.g. an OS image in a VM) the code will run just as well as it always did.

So code does spoil. And it doesn't.

> Because code isn't a good that spoils

It's true that the code that was previously released will forever remain open source but if all the repos get yanked off Github, that does suggest that code is probably not going to be maintained by its new owners. At least not in public.

Code does spoil. Exploits and other critical bugs are found. The only way it remains safe to use is by somebody forking the original project and maintaining. You could do that but most people aren't set up to suddenly take on a major project just to fulfil a dependency.

No argument that this is still a million times better than closed source.

The best thing to do in the short-term is to find a replacement. Even if you don't need it, have something that will work, is maintained and be ready to implement at the drop of a hat.

At least you usually have runway. If your favorite OSS project closes its doors, you probably have a year or three until bitrot finally closes the doors. Same goes for many closed-source softwares, and physical products.

With a closed-source service on somebody else's servers, they can turn it off tomorrow and it's just gone.

>Why is this so exceptional? What would we do if twitter folded tomorrow? things like this happen all the time.

obviously you're not an actuary but lay some odds that twitter folds tomorrow. (literally; overnight.)

"We have made the decision to evolve our company mission and, as of today, we will no longer offer downloads." is the least respectful and most opaque phrase I've ever heard. What would have been the risk of something more honest and direct?

Seriously. This is beyond crass. Not 2 months ago, I came this close to betting on and recommending FoundationDB. Today I would have been swimming in a world of shit (not to mention wasted time) had I recommended these guys.

I'm never one to begrudge exits, but they blew this. Even if financial circumstances meant they had to turn down the product, there are way better ways to do that before yanking everything and disappearing.

Dave Scherer, Dave Rosenthal: I hope you're stocking up for a long cozy retirement at Apple. I honestly don't know how you expect to be trusted by a faithful early adopter ever again.

Indeed - this reads as "we no longer need you, the customer, so screw you". Not a good look for anyone who is looking to move on from this company, especially if they are in management and presumably would have had something to say about how things wound down.

Maybe something more is at play here than just the founders and team cutting access to years of their work.

Could also be something to do with a certain company who doesn't like you to have access to (certain) assets of their acquisition after it went through. I mean, they did the same thing with TestFlight. janking Android support directly after the acquisition (and closing it altogether a while later) and Logic (yanking Windows support directly after the acquisition and making the product OSX exclusive).

You could say Apple really is quite ruthless and basically acts like a asshole when it comes to acquisitions, even though their CEO seems to be quite a nice and gentle person (at least after work hours)

Let's not forget Siri.

De rigueur comment: What happens when Apple buys a closed source company you depend on.

It's odd that they imply foundation db has a strength in scalable performance that other no sql databases do not which would be handy for financial applications but then fail to mention apple pay as a potential use case.

Despite the fact that this is not only happen in Apple specific case as the title suggest and probably, a quite generalization of what Apple do to the company it bought, the article raises a good point to carefully decide what technology solution you use for your company.

We have to expect that any product that we used might come to an end someday, and need to make sure that we at least have an escape plan for that.

At least Apple makes puts it out of its misery quickly, unlike the likes of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, who have been known to let products of acquired companies live on like zombies before finally "sunsetting" them.

How often haven't we read the whole fake happy "we're so excited, but nothing will change" press releases? Those have become a running joke.

I much rather have 3 years to migrate away from google's "zombies" than having the rug pulled out from under me overnight.

Uh, how is this different? These zombies most likely will also offer no support or security patches. Hence the term "zombie". The only difference here would be that you could possibly still download the last version from their site which is not the case with FoundationDB.

As long as you have the latest version and you put it in your SCM or wherever you want to keep these things, you are just as able to take 3 years to migrate away from FoundationDB as you would be from one of these zombies.

At least with FoundationDB, as others have said, you actually know now what will happen in the future, with the zombie you might spend additional time "sticking it out" before you realize they will stay dead. That would be time you could have used to start the migration.

If Apple gets any bigger we're going to have to start worrying about them buying Google and then shutting it down.

I imagine it's impossible in practice, but it's fun to entertain theoretically. Right now it seems GOOG has a market cap of $383.11B and Apple has $178B on hand [1].

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-cash-178-bil...

Not to mention, to buy out Google, they'd need to offer at least 20% above the market price (probably even more).

Google has $60b cash. Apple can borrow $205b, buy Google for $383b, use Google's $60b cash to pay off the debt, with Apple ending up owing $145b. It's not too unreasonable for a $718.66b company to be $145b in debt.

Alternatively, use a script and cash offer. Pay $178b in cash and the rest in shares.

All of this is possible, but as Page & Brin own 56% of voting power so all Apple would be getting is Google's income, but have no say to its decision making process. I assume Page & Brin aren't selling.

Not really worth it for an extra $16b per year.

Pretty sure the FTC would not approve that merger, since it would give Apple a monopoly on mobile device operating systems, and arguably "tech" in general.

Same thing happened with the 13th Lab pointcloud SDK getting sucked into Oculus. We also see it with developers getting sucked into Google/FB etc...

OPEN SOURCE, dudes. Protection from your vendor is why you need it.

This is something you learn after getting burnt by a vendor of $L33T_TOOL_OF_THE_DAY a few times.

The article cites CouchDB as how this kind of thing can play out differently for open-source software. The first example that came to my mind was Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and the subsequent MySQL forks (e.g. MariaDB). Of course, we still have MySQL today, and AFAIK it remains to be seen what will happen to FoundationDB. I doubt Apple will kill it.

I'd still like to know what Apple is going to do with PrimeSense. Thanks to that purchase, I have to rely on used Kinects for all of my depth sensing needs.

If this acquisition was in any way related to Apple wanting to use this product in-house -- call me massively confused. It really would be a mental sickness if Apple were so insistent on using closed-source tech across the organization, even while that is a very obscure line of thinking amongst it's competitors in the cloud space. On the other hand, if Apple is acqui-hiring these guys -- then why kill the download links instantly? So yeah, either way, seems like a poorly handled situation

Just because the tech companies we read about on hacker news rely on and contribute to open source, doesn't mean that its a 'mental sickness' to use proprietary products. There's good workloads for open source (Apple uses hadoop/hbase heavily internally), and then theres unique proprietary solutions.

The mental sickness wouldn't be using any proprietary software. The mental sickness would be acquiring a closed source database and keeping the tech closed source. Databases specifically seem to have a huge mindshare and usage share around open source. And when conventional stores haven't fulfilled a need, solutions like Cassandra, CouchBase, and Mongodb have been released as open source software. I don't really think Apple has some unique data persistence needs to require such an obscure path, if that is really what they were doing

The website doesn't even mention anything relating to the purchase from what I can see https://foundationdb.com/

Edit: Ah.. its on the community page: http://community.foundationdb.com/

Were these people paying customers? If not what did they expect would happen.

To combine this with another comment, free and closed source means that at some point, many of those users will be massively disappointed. I can think of very few exceptions.

Google search engine is free and closed source?

Sure, some of us are disappointed with how our search data is treated, but the disappointment for most generally ends at incognito mode, not that close to 'massive'.

That's quite a big exception.

Everyone know how Google makes money though, through ads. A database company doesn't have that option.

Even if it were true that Google doesn't have a business model, that's still only one exception.

> Like other NoSQL databases, FoundationDB offered a way to build databases that spanned hundreds or thousands of different servers, often housed in geographically distant data centers.

What?

> FoundationDB promised a way to provide scalability without sacrificing performance

Wait, what?

I understand that FoundationDB's main point of differentiation from other NoSQL document DBs was support for transactional integrity across documents. Others (i.e. all open-source options, AFAIK) support atomic transactions only on a single document.

Sounds like the author had been told this, didn't quite get it, and mumbled this stuff instead.

"That leaves companies that depended on that software out of luck. And when startups suffer, so does innovation."

Uhhh except that their existence outright is in itself innovation. Removing their existence cannot reduce innovation since their initial existence furthered it.

cliffs: article is dumb and author is an idiot. at least i think, i had to stop reading the article.

... it reduces future innovation, it doesn't undo past innovation.

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