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by Kivlov84 4046 days ago
Hi guys, Alexander from Meat! over here.

Thanks for expressing your concern, it's totally understandable and we appreciate that.

Now, to clear things up: we're a team of 10 and we spent an entire year on developing Meat!, day in, day out. To be honest, the license was our least concern, we just wanted to give you software that wouldn't be just another GitLab clone (hi there GitLab folks!) and we didn't devote the license the attention it required. Sorry about that, we're going to give it a closer look once we get some sleep this weekend.

Anyway, if there's enough response from the community for Open Source - then we'll do Meat! Open Source. We've never had any problems with that and we never will. Just let us know.

We're going live next week and you'll be able to evaluate the software for yourself. Your feedback will be most welcomed.

Cheers, Alex and the Team at Meat!

4 comments

  Anyway, if there's enough response from the community for
  Open Source - then we'll do Meat! Open Source. We've 
  never had any problems with that and we never will. Just 
  let us.
I hear this a lot. Why wait? Who cares if there's no community response? It costs you nothing to throw up a repository, and it's free advertising. Maybe you'd even have time to talk to a real attorney about getting a useful license in place. Your potential customers would be able to answer their own questions by looking at the code, and enthusiastic supporters will submit improvements for free.

If your service is worth money, it will make money regardless of who can see your source code, but it does not reflect well on your team as a business operation that you were unable or unwilling to properly construct or acquire the single most important document relating to your income.

Hi there Meat folks! Congratulations on the release, it looks really nice. Can you elaborate on the reasons for making something new? Feature wise GitLab CI already has deploy jobs, the only thing I see that is still missing from GitLab are chained builds http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions...
sytse, our deployment system is completely different from yours - I think the best idea is that you leave your email at our site http://getmeat.io and we'll send you an invite next week so you can check it out for yourself.

I think that comparing Meat! to GitLab is more like comparing Star Wars to Star Trek (choose whichever you like best) than, say, choosing between the the Lannisters and House Targaryen :)

Cheers!

Cool, I've signed up for the SaaS with web2008 at sytse dot com
Open source would be really great and a must for me to consider running it.

However, I don't understand the apparent outrage and flaming going on by others here. If you guys would've only had a payed plan without the option to self-run there would've been no problem. You offer self-hosting for free, something that you'd pay for with other services, and you are suddenly seen as the bad guys. Very strange.

Congrats on a very nice looking tool :).

You've misunderstood the real issue. Not being open source is mildly annoying, but not really a problem.

The actual problem here is that, having decided to use a non-free license for their code, they created a shitty one, which will not hold up, and is unsuitable for use when entering into a commercial relationship.

They still have plenty of time to repair this before going live, or public, or exiting stealth, or showing anything to anyone, or whatever they feel like calling it. But such an obvious misstep is very, very concerning to see in a company that proposes to maintain the software that manages such an important resource.

It is not so much the issue at hand, it is more the way in which it is raised that I was aiming at. People are pretty aggressive in the formulating of their issues with what the guys behind Meat have done. There is no need for this.
You might be excused if your project wasn't intrinsically related to the most popular DVCS in history.

Just publish the repo, right now, and hope for the best. Don't forget to include a license file.

Can you think of another action you can take right now that would change public opinion of your project more? :)

Bonus points for self hosting!