Xcerion, please abort your mission

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:06:44 +0000

So back in early may 2007 (yes 2007) I signed up for the Xcerion Beta program, I`m always interested in the next new Internet OS etc so I tought it was a good idea to give it a try.

In December of that same year I got a message stating that I made it to their Beta cloud. Their mail stated

This is your invitation to participate in Xcerion's XIOS/3 Beta program. You are one of the first in the world to get access to XIOS/3.
We currently only support IE6+ browsers. We are working on adding Firefox support (high priority).

Obviously didn't sign up ..
In April when I got the invite mail for the 4th time .. I replied to the Xcerion folks ..

As I am a Linux user .. I need firefox , since your initial mail
december 21st last year you say that Firefoxx support is high
priority ...

Their reply:

We have made some great progress on the Firefox version. This is the most
complex and fully featured cloud OS available, which makes porting more time
consuming. We are also constantly adding a lot of features. Xcerion is also
considering doing a native Linux version :)

Today I got yet another mail from them guess what still isn't supported ?

We currently support IE6+ browsers. Rest assured that we are working on adding Firefox support (high priority). The Firefox support will also enable usage of icloud on Mac and Linux

It's time to give up guys .. you lost the battle.

Let your betatesters pay !

Kris Buytaert — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:51:37 +0000

Slashdot totally misinterpreted Jeremy's post about MySQL starting to build features first for their customers. As a business model , this sounds like a good way to get revenue , customers want certain features that are valuable to them , so why not let them pay for it .

The question however is how your development cycle works. Often this method of keeping code first for your paying customers , and when "the feature has been paid for" give it to the opensource community , is the wrong one.

What it comes down to is that you neglect the release early , release often and the peer review , many eyeballs see more bugs, fundamentals that made opensource projects big and stable. You are in effect stepping back to a proprietary model where you have to rush your deadlines because you have promised customers such and such feature, hence letting your customers do your beta testing.

It’s not like it’s the first time MySQL pulls this trick. They already did that when building a Carrier Grade edition for Cluster. That indeed also was a product where they had customers paying for unstable beta products.

The peer review process is one of the things that insanely attracted me in Open Source, the code that you get is not some piece of overrushed code where a developer made a dozen shortcuts because he had to make a deadline, but a piece of code that has been reviewed by many , discussed, and then eventually allowed into the project.

Releasing beta level code to customers and eventually to opensource means you miss out on a lot of the features a true opensource project has.

Often the reason why Open source minded organisations still chose for this approach is to get revenue to be able to hire more developers/ support peope and improve the product faster. But it's a vicious circle, because your product isn't up to the standards you are used to you need more people to support it.

However in the MySQL case , a mostly user community, lesser user development contributions, this could make sense.

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - beta

Xcerion, please abort your mission

Let your betatesters pay !