<story><title>Firebase is Joining Google</title><url>https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-10-21-firebase-joins-google.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>christiansmith</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to take that devil by the horns and strongly suggest that companies like Firebase, who clearly deliver a critical infrastructure dependency for anyone using their service, should open source their platform as an act of good faith toward their customers.&lt;p&gt;No one wants to run yet another cluster, but anyone with an eye to business continuity ought to want the assurance that they &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; migrate to and from their own servers if that need should arise.&lt;p&gt;That might not be in the short term interests of Firebase, but it&amp;#x27;s definitely in the long term interests of their customers. Why would anyone ever base the future of their own business on the exit needs of another company&amp;#x27;s investors? It &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a ridiculous risk. As much as I love what Firebase has built, I&amp;#x27;d never use it for anything more than a toy project for that exact reason.&lt;p&gt;Basho, ElasticSearch and Docker(?) seem to be on a good path with commercial open source models. Is there any reason that a startup like Firebase couldn&amp;#x27;t do both? Offer their open source product as a service with non-critical value adds? GitHub is another example that comes to mind. If they were to get bought and shut down, it would be a pain in the ass to set up new remotes, but no one would have to stop using git.</text></item><item><author>johns</author><text>Startup dilemma pre-acquisition: &amp;quot;they&amp;#x27;re just a startup! how will I know they&amp;#x27;ll be around in 12 months?! so risky!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Startup dilemma post-acquisition: &amp;quot;they&amp;#x27;re no longer in control! how can I trust they&amp;#x27;ll be around in 12 months!? so risky!&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Congrats founders, YC, and other shareholders!&lt;p&gt;But still, I just started using Firebase, and this news makes it clear to me that I should move off them as soon as I can. Firebase was an interesting technology supplier: When they were a small company, I could count on it that as a customer, I would count. Google is known to not give a damn about paying customers (ref: all the Google Apps customers who lose their email (for whatever reason) and get redirected to a FAQ page with answers to unrelated questions). Google is also known to Be Evil: I&amp;#x27;m not sure I dare waiting until the terms change such that my user&amp;#x27;s data is subject to googlebot scanning.&lt;p&gt;Firebase&amp;#x27;s business model is aligned with my interests: the more users I have, the more I (hopefully) earn, so the more I pay Firebase. I strongly doubt, however, that Google is buying Firebase because they think they can get very rich selling Firebase subscriptions. It&amp;#x27;s either going to turn out a acquihire, or it is some part of a grand ecosystem plan. Acquihire means they&amp;#x27;ll pull the plug sooner or later, grand ecosystem plan means vendor lock-in. While I&amp;#x27;m happy to be locked in to the services of a small independent business, I&amp;#x27;d think twice before becoming entirely dependent on a company that could lose me as a customer and not even notice the slightest impact on their bottom line.&lt;p&gt;I know all of the Firebase guys are reading this, and I don&amp;#x27;t mean to piss on your parade. I&amp;#x27;m certain you&amp;#x27;re not lying when you say that things are only going to get better. But I&amp;#x27;m also certain that your jobs don&amp;#x27;t depend on that anymore, and when higher-ups decide to move the big boat&amp;#x27;s direction, Firebase might be over sooner than any of us wants it to.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a pretty big risk to take as a startup that fully depends on Firebase for their data storage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kenjackson</author><text>One company similar in services to FireBase is FanOut (fanout.io) and they share your open philosophy.  Their server code is open source, and they make money by running it for you.  I&amp;#x27;m optimistic about FanOut and hope that they can be a success based on this model (and their service in general).</text></comment>
<story><title>Firebase is Joining Google</title><url>https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-10-21-firebase-joins-google.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>christiansmith</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to take that devil by the horns and strongly suggest that companies like Firebase, who clearly deliver a critical infrastructure dependency for anyone using their service, should open source their platform as an act of good faith toward their customers.&lt;p&gt;No one wants to run yet another cluster, but anyone with an eye to business continuity ought to want the assurance that they &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; migrate to and from their own servers if that need should arise.&lt;p&gt;That might not be in the short term interests of Firebase, but it&amp;#x27;s definitely in the long term interests of their customers. Why would anyone ever base the future of their own business on the exit needs of another company&amp;#x27;s investors? It &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a ridiculous risk. As much as I love what Firebase has built, I&amp;#x27;d never use it for anything more than a toy project for that exact reason.&lt;p&gt;Basho, ElasticSearch and Docker(?) seem to be on a good path with commercial open source models. Is there any reason that a startup like Firebase couldn&amp;#x27;t do both? Offer their open source product as a service with non-critical value adds? GitHub is another example that comes to mind. If they were to get bought and shut down, it would be a pain in the ass to set up new remotes, but no one would have to stop using git.</text></item><item><author>johns</author><text>Startup dilemma pre-acquisition: &amp;quot;they&amp;#x27;re just a startup! how will I know they&amp;#x27;ll be around in 12 months?! so risky!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Startup dilemma post-acquisition: &amp;quot;they&amp;#x27;re no longer in control! how can I trust they&amp;#x27;ll be around in 12 months!? so risky!&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Congrats founders, YC, and other shareholders!&lt;p&gt;But still, I just started using Firebase, and this news makes it clear to me that I should move off them as soon as I can. Firebase was an interesting technology supplier: When they were a small company, I could count on it that as a customer, I would count. Google is known to not give a damn about paying customers (ref: all the Google Apps customers who lose their email (for whatever reason) and get redirected to a FAQ page with answers to unrelated questions). Google is also known to Be Evil: I&amp;#x27;m not sure I dare waiting until the terms change such that my user&amp;#x27;s data is subject to googlebot scanning.&lt;p&gt;Firebase&amp;#x27;s business model is aligned with my interests: the more users I have, the more I (hopefully) earn, so the more I pay Firebase. I strongly doubt, however, that Google is buying Firebase because they think they can get very rich selling Firebase subscriptions. It&amp;#x27;s either going to turn out a acquihire, or it is some part of a grand ecosystem plan. Acquihire means they&amp;#x27;ll pull the plug sooner or later, grand ecosystem plan means vendor lock-in. While I&amp;#x27;m happy to be locked in to the services of a small independent business, I&amp;#x27;d think twice before becoming entirely dependent on a company that could lose me as a customer and not even notice the slightest impact on their bottom line.&lt;p&gt;I know all of the Firebase guys are reading this, and I don&amp;#x27;t mean to piss on your parade. I&amp;#x27;m certain you&amp;#x27;re not lying when you say that things are only going to get better. But I&amp;#x27;m also certain that your jobs don&amp;#x27;t depend on that anymore, and when higher-ups decide to move the big boat&amp;#x27;s direction, Firebase might be over sooner than any of us wants it to.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a pretty big risk to take as a startup that fully depends on Firebase for their data storage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SiVal</author><text>Maybe Google could open source it themselves. A lot of us didn&amp;#x27;t want to risk much on Firebase, because who knew what might happen to a small company. With the acquisition, we are now in the position of not wanting to risk a significant part of our business on an insignificant part of Google&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;What to do?&lt;p&gt;Google could resolve that by both hosting Firebase and open sourcing it. That way, you could outsource the critical Firebase management to Google and not have to build it yourself, while still having the security of knowing that if Google ever made it unavailable (shutting it down, worsening service, raising the price, etc.), you wouldn&amp;#x27;t be wiped out.&lt;p&gt;They already offer hosted database service for other OS databases. I hope they&amp;#x27;ll do the same with Firebase.</text></comment>