[psm]

we encourage you to look at appscale for app mobility. we're not interested in artificial lock-in from APIs. we're not that kind of a company. we're confident we can make the overall service superior. please note that we haven't changed the prices since we launched pricing, and GAE was in preview. that's an element to the notion of "preview". we're now taking it out of preview into a fully supported Google product. and part of that was to reprice so we have a sustainable business. after we announced the new pricing in May at I/O, we've actually seen our growth rate increase, since customers appreciate that we're committing to GAE.

[nknight]

AppScale deeply confuses me.

They seem to do a rare (once a year or so) push of whatever they've developed into a public source repo, and then just leave it there. No updates, no bug fixes, no community involvement, etc.

Their site looks like they're trying to sell me something, but there's no commercial product in evidence. And the whole thing seems to be done under the auspices of a university.

There's a link to their supposed development branch, bizarrely on launchpad instead of Google Code where they seem largely based, but it's empty.

I'm not really inclined to put time and effort into something whose model and motivation completely escapes and/or scares me.

[nlake44]

We're very much graduate students and our testing cycle takes a lot of time away from doing research and publishing papers. We try to keep the main branch as stable as possible though for those who just want to get the latest and greatest. Our branches are pretty active and we do track issues/bugs and fix them, although you're right that we don't do so on our Google Code page. https://code.launchpad.net/~appscale-maintainers/appscale/ap...

[nknight]

OK, that answers a hell of a lot of questions, thanks!

I also now note that there's a "Contribute" link at the very bottom of your main site.

If I may make a couple other suggestions:

* Fixing the "Development Branch" link on your page (it's in the "Download" menu) which confusingly points to this totally inactive URL: https://code.launchpad.net/~cgb-cs/appscale/appscale

* Making some sort of statement on the Google Code page about your development practices and the fact that the bleeding edge is on Launchpad. People like me go to a Google Code page expecting to see the development site, complete with an active source tree, and get very confused when that's not what it really is.

[nlake44]

Thanks for pointing that out. Updated.

[esrauch]

Don't take this the wrong way, but when you are presenting yourself as a representative for a company (when you are using "we" to mean Google) you may want to use proper capitalization and grammar otherwise it makes your company seem like a popsicle stand instead of a Fortune 500 company.