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  • 2 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • TL;DR

    A decently big casino, as you could guess from the article, was getting away with Cloudflare’s Business Plan (250$/month, which even the author in the post agrees was a “fairly low price”, likely downplaying it).

    The Cloudflare team reached out to them to let them know their usage does not fit into the tier anymore and they need to pay the custom price of an Enterprise plan, which may, or may not have been fair since the author does not provide any relevant data, because they were cut off from the stats since they had their account terminated.

    The casino refused and indicated they are at talks with Fastly, which was a stupid thing to tell to the CF team, because on their end it was looking like “yeah, we’re going to keep freeloading until we move to another company”, so they decided to terminate the casino’s account.

    The story taught the author not to rely on proprietary services. I hope it might also teach them not to rely on any service if they are getting away with a price that is way too cheap for the resources they consume.














  • Is it a blunder? Tell that to Apple, Jetbrains, or Microsoft, each of whom have proprietary code editors that net billions of dollars of revenue.

    I expected you to say that! The only mentioned company that has a proprietary code editor is Jetbrains with their Fleet. Visual Studio, XCode, most jetbrains products are IDEs.

    IDEs are big, bloated products that don’t need hackability because they already come prepackaged with everything. Code editors are different. Developers also like stuff being open source so they can put their trust into it — if everything goes to hell, somebody could fork it, which would save you from the need to find another properietary editor and change your workflow.

    Ultimately, who develops OSS doesn’t matter anymore. Even the Linux kernel, the thing that comes to mind to most people when they think of “open source”, is developed by a lot of people working for corporations, on paid positions specifically to develop the kernel.

    Instead, consider that making something open source is often just a marketing strategy — or a soft way to sunset a project.

    I can’t disagree with that, but my point is that if being an open source code editor is so important, then there is a bigger probability that the team behind Zed are fixing the mistake, rather then sunsetting the software.


  • I am a little concerned that they started off commercial and then went open source. Open source is great! But this path sometimes means that the original developers no longer have the time/money/interest to keep developing it. I hope that’s not the case here because they’ve got the start of something good.

    Developing a proprietary code editor is a blunder. The big players in the space are Vim, Emacs and VSCode, all of which are open source, so you can’t outcompete those unless you go open source yourself. Being customisable and source-hackable is the key in making your product being liked by developers, obviously.

    My bet is they simply realised the mistake and decided to fix it.