savoy11

So I am pretty sure you have your successful open source story to share. Where you saved the queen, anything green, the oxygen, as we know it - and made millions along the way - while slaying bad guys around.

PS. It is easy to spot a clown.

Excellent HN material. Out of the 0 startups, that ran Node.js to be successful, 0 ran it to do Scrabble for their day-to-day-work.

Thank you HN for that unique experience. You are almost as good as state school and IT hot-shot series at Martha Stewart TV.

I'm not quite sure how/why you think this is news. Something going open source historically means 99% death. I really hope you get to be that 1% of the lucky ones... but...

I believe at this point most of the people on news.ycombinator are well aware of the "work at startup" bait. If you are that good to help a startup to grow from 0 to millions, you typically get $150K at Google (for example). For the 4-5 years it typically gets for the very few successful startups to cash out, you will be earning $750K for sure + benefits + sanity + normal life.

If you are that good and you are not one of the founders, you have to be very careful in your decision to join a startup. For every success story (it gets multiplied x 1,000,000 by the press), there are thousands of dramas and flops noone hears about.

And there we go - the typical HN oh no, it costs money ($99 for an engine, mind you, that may save you hundreds of hours development time). How much do you charge per hour? Can this library save you hundreds of hours? Do the math.

I am not surpirsed at all that the average tech startup is a failure, with more than half of the people failing to get the "charge money for product/service" model everyone else in the world is using.

Oh no, it costs money. So what exactly are you trying to start that succeeds without having a price tag on it? Man, I get tired of this, really. For every spot-on comment on HN, I read 5 that make me dumber each day.

This is a ridiculous post and can be upvoted only here.

The daily Microsoft bashing HN post. There are literally thousands of startups started by ex-Microsoft marketers, developers, sales people and they are doing great. Microsoft is definitely doing great as well.

People are smart and can adapt. They will fight for politics and budget in big organization and they will get work done at startups. Labeling someone as "non-hire" just because they worked in Microsoft is plain stupid. Neglecting so much success and real on the field experience - definitely not smart.

By the way, using the same logic - marketers from Google and Facebook shoud not be hired too? Or this will not appeal to the HN community, no Microsoft, so noone to hate.

Of course reading the OP author bio confirms that - senior positions at Siebel, IBM, etc - they are obviously THAT MUCH different from Microsoft, really. So much hypocrisy. So much bullshit.

Come on.

That's why noone is taking you seriously, folks. Copy/Pasting .NET and you claim you do not even have the original on your machine - nobody is going to use your crap. How on Earth am I going to trust my business on Mono when you claim that ridiculous shit.

"Open Source Developer" is not a job or career or profession. How many people out there really make their money checking in open source code? 0.1% of all developers? 0.01%? Most people do it in their free time, use it as marketing tool for their consulting/commercial offers, etc.

Miguel de Icaza for one might have Macbook, but I am sure it at least dual boots to Windows. It would not be possible otherwise, since he needs to run .NET non-stop and copy/paste code from Reflector to his Mono implementation, or whatever they are doing to clone .NET to Mono.

And I am pretty sure Apple Software has nothing to do with how they really win their bucks. So no need to look for logic here - they just like the shiny hardware cause they are geeks. That's it. No rocket science or philosophy here.

This is not correct. There were multiple MVC frameworks on top of ASP.NET years ago, including Monorail and FubuMVC and a lot more actually. All of them were open source. Some of them were quite good, actually.

Were you active there? Did you contribute something? Did you commit fixes/features. No, you did not. But of course you do contribute to the complaining.

Another day, another leaving .NET/Java for Ruby/Python post. This very link btw got posted twice, the first post was 3 months ago. Aren't you guys tired of that? We get it - HN is the place where people will go at great lengths to contribute/code all night rather than use something that works out of the box and juts move on. I am always surprised on the often hardcore technical problems discussed here and the relative lack of in-depth startup/business topics - and this is what starting up a company really is all about.

ASP.NET MVC is probably in the top 3 web frameworks created, and WebForms is not that bad either. ViewState/Page-Lifecycle - you can use this or not - it is up to you. You can always do the HTML5 stuff in ASP.NET too, and most of the code is jQuery now anyway, so why the big fuss?

And what do you mean there is no community around ASP.NET? Have you heard about StackOverflow? The majority of the devs are ASP.NET developers there, with ASP.NET and C#/Javascript being the most tagged posts - literally every single question gets answered asap.

And what's wrong with the 3rd party vendors? They exist, support and enhance the eco-system producing some great tools along the way. Like Rasharper. Like UI widgets. Like database tools. How many times have you seen an open source project with great potential just die because there was nobody to take over and maintain it? Understand - some companies have REAL business out there - not the next social this, web that average crap startups have on $0 revenue. They want REAL partners that they can rely on and WILL pay for that. Heck, you are paying $100K to your developers, why not pay $5K for a proven software and win some time/use the resources of the partner? What is the friggin' deal with that?

Grow up. Is it like mid-age crisis? You just need switching things now and then and trying to figure out the reasons? One of the top reasons I've seen companies fail is to switch technologies just for the sake of switching and "keeping it fun" - from a business point of view it is ridiculous to invest 8 years in a framework and then just switch, like that.

The unfortunate truth is that big companies can play that game - this or that is free and commoditizing software in general - they can win elsewhere. A very good example is what Google is doing with browsers and all kinds of software just to win on AdWords/Sense.

The bad news is that small companies cannot do that easily - they typically rely on a single product/service that they need to charge people for, like any traditional business out there.

Same with app stores - they are pretty much forcing 3rd party devs to give away or sell for pennies. Sure, we get this occasional story of a successful mobile product, but the truth is for each success there are tens of thousands of apps making close to nothing.

This, for me, is NOT a good trend for software startups. The whole "free" movement make it exceedingly hard to sell software nowadays.

Why are people always writing these types of posts? .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered, no need to bash Microsoft on that. And what's the deal with licensing? We, as software developers and entrepreneurs, eventually want to charge money for some product/service and I personally find it much easier to do in .NET/Corporate settings - Microsoft has just managed to educate people that software costs money.

I find it much, much harder to charge money (I'm in the developer tools space) in the "FREE", open source, free is beer, as... whatever, and all that crap world, where people would just expect you to work full-time several years with $0 revenue - I just do not understand all that crap.

So massive respect to Microsoft - these guys are doing us a huge favor by educating people that software costs money.

The co-relations of driving, being a doctor, etc are really making me laugh hard. How much of what you have guys written is that important? FourSquare... look at me, I'm at McDonads and taking a pee

You guys are taking yourself why too seriously, for a (most probably) lousy job.

Right, but I'd like to hear the reasoning behind that. You mate with women while being drunk, you do lots of other stuff - and most of it is good. So why not code?

Give me the explanation behind that.

I am just saying there are two sides of the story and we have not heard the other side yet. And we are talking about a professional and personal life getting ruined here (the guy is already screwed up regardless of what comes out of this, with this HN submission and even a Techcrunch article about that).

We are getting a pattern of events that emerges we need to analyze that. Public history of multiple sexual harassment claims in blog posts, "flirting with a couple of guys", "having several drinks", "private party in my room". Try to be fair here - we need to hear the other side of the story here for sure.

Yes, thanks, I'll upvote that since it is spot on. You pretty much nailed all the issues we have.

At this point we have chosen to just keep on. If we manage to sustain this type of progress for the next 2-3 years, things cannot go worse. All that potential buying thing puts an extra layer of problems, heavy discussions, waste of time, lawyers, etc.

As far as out assets go - we might be very valuable since we bring a very successful open source project (site has 1.2M page view per month) + commercial products built on top of it. Just the name and open source site pointing to our competitors may bring them a lot of value alone.

Our usage base (for the open source products) is also huge. The goodwill and IP are I believe quite expensive at this point.

But we will just move on and keep going. Thanks a lot.

Read carefully guys before downvoting and know there are always two sides of the same story. Tomorrow this can happen to you too. Ruining someone's personal and professional life forever is a very drastic thing to do and is a very hard punishment even for the worst crimes.

This is a comment from her blog post. This greatly differs from her original point that she has never talked about this before, let alone name anyone.

<quote> Please don’t think i’m accusing you of fabricating this story but it concerns me greatly that this isn’t the first time you have blogged about being sexual assaulted and named the men involved. Why do you think it is ok for you to do this?

I don’t know who Florian Leibert is but without any proof of what happened you have essentially libeled him by making a (technically) baseless allegation of sexual assault.

Very competitive, established and growing segment. Also, kind of big. Developer tools, basically. There are are at least 5 very big companies (revenues of $10mil+) and hundreds of employees each, and like 100 small companies in this segment.

It's a very hard and competitive field.

I'd like to put this into the perspective of a foreigner. I believe the sexual assault problem has been blown out of proportions in American culture - there are things that are just too much, like the sex offenders registration/web site for example. Sex offending is a bad crime, but so is killing someone with a car while driving drunk, how come there is no web site for offenders like that? You can very easily ruin someone's life forever with a blog post like this and while I do not defend him, I believe this is too much and too mean to do at this point, especially without hard evidence of what really happened. This blog post will come #1 for his name forever on all Google searches, she has effectively ruined his personal and professional life forever now.

This sex offender thing results in curious effects in American society that I have not seen anywhere else. For example, in a typical American bar/night-club, the women would typically be the active part in initiating conversations and even talk directly about sex/one-night stands. This has happened to me multiple times. Men are very cautious to even initiate a conversation, let alone suggest something more, because it is very easy to label this sex offense. This is at least my observation with my American friends (Silicon Valley, educated, geek) - this may be different somewhere else.

Just my $0.02. I do not defend the guy, it is just so easy to drop names in blog posts lie that, but you have to be careful when you do that. Also read the comments on her blog. Some of the comments say that this is not the first time she has written blog posts about her being sexually offended (contrary to what she says it's the first time she talks about that). Do not kill the guy based on that. Even if he did what she claims, there are still 1,000 crimes that are much worse than that and we do not even discuss them so much here.

btw - somewhat related - how much money can be made of Google Ads out of a site with 1 million page views per month? Content is technical - developer oriented. We are currently running a niche ad network and making approximately $1000 per month off ads, but I believe this is low.

Almost full-time. Product is also very support intensive (a lot of email/forum support that is highly technical).

The product can fit well into competitors portfolio of products and can make them much more than what we do (they are established, big, have sales channels, etc)

This is correct, demographics/industry specifics should be taken into account. What I was trying to say is that we also had something similar (IE stats very low)when we developed our product/service - when you are in Beta, your team and the early adopters are typically more tech savvy and do not use IE.

However, once you launch, IE visitors become the majority - at least in my particular case (in a sector that seems similar to what the blog post says). Even if the purchasing decision makers are not using IE, in my particular case many of the licensed users will be just corporate/normal job types, and IE is the majority there.

Just my $0.02, your case may be different.

The sample of visits is probably too small and misleading. Developers (e.g. you and guys on the team developing the product) tend to use FireFox and now, Chrome, whereas most users will use the stock browser they have by default - IE.

I am running a company in a similar sector (tech related util software), and IE visits are more than 60%. Not to mention, that most corporate users have as a rigid requirement and you are effectively killing a lot of revenue potential.

So no - my advice is do not do it, support IE.