| What I find interesting about the reaction to this email, from you bench spectators, is that you completely missed the point of the email. The email isn't "Wah we hit a server problem, bye bye." The point is: "What this has really shown us is that, if we open Charm to the general public, we won't be able to provide you with the kind of service you deserve. We are a tiny team, and so far, we've had zero luck in our attempts to grow by hiring developers. Problems which are small now will only get bigger." If you've never run a serious product, or a real business, or tried to hire for technical positions, I can understand why you'd zero in on the "facts" about the technical situation and ignore all the "foofy personal window dressing," and write things like "I call BS! It's a smoke screen!" or "Why didn't they just try BSD?" And yet I addressed the actual problem in very clear terms in a paragraph you can't possibly miss. Next time somebody makes a hard business decision and you hear about it on HN and come out, irony guns blazing, may I humbly suggest you read more than the subject line written by the unrelated HN submitter? As for any poor silent, lurkers who wonder if this is how they will be treated if they -- gasp! -- ever find themselves in over their heads, or in a business they realize they don't actually want to be in… our customer reactions have been uniformly: "Aw, I'm so sorry... Charm is such a nice piece of software... your email was so touching." Why? Because we've always shown our customers respect by creating great software, and we're showing them even more respect by ensuring we do not make promises we can't keep. Our friends and technical acquaintances have been full of nothing but sympathy, understanding, and for those closest to the situation, praise for making the right, hard decision. Yep, it sucked. Yep, we poured something like $200k into development, redevelopment, and infrastructure all told. Yep, it is a fucking amazing piece of software and the best thing I've ever designed. But is it worth the constant heartache of the impossible task of finding people equipped to work on it? Of having it stuck in some kind of product half-life because of that? Of feeling responsible for, but incapable of, being "on call" in the middle of the night? Of feeling guilty because, unless we can somehow suddenly be great at those things, we're taking money for a service which might let our customers down? Nope. It's not worth it. And boy do I feel lucky and privileged that because we spent nothing but our own money on it, we are free to decide to do whatever we think is right. See also my principles 10 and 11: http://unicornfree.com/2011/lessons-learned-from-16-years-of... |