Oh gosh. This is not a very good precedent. I hope the children are taught that:
-The radiation from WIFI is the same type as what comes from the Sun, which is essential for all life on earth.
-We all emit radiation.

A New Privacy Enhancing HTML5 Mobile Browser - It's your remote control for the world.

Part of 3 startups. So you've worked in Silicon Valley. Good for you. If you are some amazing founder/investor, instead of a know-it-all software engineer, please do post your personal links so I can learn more.

BTW The Wave stuff was only a small component of our value offering. So your supposition that we "built a startup around a protocol that wasn't yet released, that wasn't well documented, that wasn't in your control" is just wrong. That's why I said "partially". There were other contributing factors.

Shrug. So I have a higher risk tolerance than you. Everyone is different. If you don't understand or believe that startups/companies are a bundle of bets on many different factors that you can't control then you don't understand startups. I think you need to have more exits than me if you are going to criticize my business sense, Mr. Armchair Quarterback. Also the company ultimately died because on of the investors was bright enough to knock back an offer of investment. That person wasn't me.
Also we trusted Google's word. Some of the API's (eg. the Robots API) got plenty of traction early on. We built a replacement. Like I said it wasn't the only contributing factor, but it didn't help. When a big company makes a promise like that - you expect them to follow through.

Here's what happened in excruciating detail:

1) Google Releases Wave, claims it will be open source. Promises/Tells a Fibonacci.
2) Google doesn't release Wave as open source for various reasons eg: protocol buffers toolchain underneath deemed too valuable. (Please don't argue this, the protocol buffers stuff that's been released is only a tiny part of the story.)
3) Google builds a terrible open source replacement pretty much from scratch. It BARELY works for one commit nearly 3 years after they claim Wave will be open sourced. It never has been. Entire affair is swept under carpet.

I know because I had an ehealth startup that died partially as a result of this. In the end, after we realized we had been hoodwinked (this post excludes private conversations we had with Google) we wrote a Wave-like thing around part of our technology in record time and it surprisingly turned out really well, but unfortunately it was too late, and company died. That was sad. Startups are fragile things.

Anyhow, try sharejs it's written by a former Wave team member and it's better. You can easily wrap gwt around that if you need to. Or, I'm highly skeptical but you can try JBoss Errai, they have written an OT framework into their weird everything framework. OT is a pretty complicated bit of code, and they just stuck it in a directory errai-otec like it was any other feature (eg. a Base64 encoder). I would rate the chance their OT impl has major issues as very high. I don't really understand corporate open source like this, so I'd love to see an Errai person explain the project. I'm guessing the thesis is somehow based around upselling a service of some sort.

tl;dr You want this.

Support A Free Internet

We've just released a new mobile browser for android. We have a number of innovative feature in the works to improve the mobile browsing experience. Fairly soon, we will release the desktop to mobile form factor converter feature, which will also retain the option to see the page in it's original format. Here are a list of other features that will happen soon (at least for Android > v4). Over time the list will also evolve to give higher priority for mobile and tablet optimized sites. Did I mention it gives you free WIFI too through our advanced connection manager? Good connectivity is a major barrier to a great mobile web experience.

I really like the BSDs, especially Tinfoil. There will always be standalone servers. But we think that the future is partially about router/server hybrids with eg. big LRU caches. A great example of this. A busy router can easily download the same image file, 100K times a day. That's waste. In a perfect world we'd have a completely finished software system, that works everywhere, without hacks, and doesn't have to leverage the convenience of an OS that seems to have most of the market share out there. If it's any consolation anything we do should be trivially portable to the BSDs. But at the moment it doesn't seem like there is a big market for what we are doing.

tl;dr Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Thanks for your feedback. Something I've learned is that marketing and complexity don't mix, so I agree our communication strategy is not optimal. We are trying to talk to too many audiences and doing a bad job with all of them. We'll try harder.

It's a server/router hybrid. We need to be clearer about that. The specs are competitive with what you'd find in the market for regular computers, but we thought it would be distracting to break them down because some of them are subject to change.

Because at scale, the idea turns your internet acquisition cost into a one time cost. It's true that it's better for municipalities to adopt this kind of technology than individuals. Sharing your connection: For better performance and your privacy. We probably could probably selll the privacy aspect more, as I think our architecture is the best I know out there for turning the internet back into the bastion of liberty it once was, rather than the surveillance state it has become. Our solution to this by the way was to create a commodity market for anonymous distributed computation, but more work needs to be done.

I admit there are critical mass issues, and this is a very legitimate criticism of the project. Our strategy to bootstrap this network is to run our network over the regular internet until such time that it spreads to someone near you in physical proximity.

I don't think it's nonsense. We are trying to turn internet acquisition into a one time cost. It's a high price, why we were asking people to get in touch with internet.org for us and ask them to talk to us. We've now made contact with them, and hope something comes of it.

Mish-mash: That's true, but I think the strength of our approach will come out as we roll out more of our stuff. If you are serious about solving this problem you have to look at it from a lot of different angles. Also most WIFI hardware sold out there has closed source drivers, even on Linux. That's a nonstarter for a project like ours. Controlling the hardware makes things much easier.

Anyhow, thanks for this feedback. Overall, it's some of the best we've got. We'll review it and act accordingly to improve our message.

I wouldn't.

Our team of scientists and Linux netwokring experts has an open, next generation router project up on IndieGogo right now, but we aren't getting much traction. I guess we missed product-market fit. To the point that we are have modified the campaign to ask people not to buy the router or if they do - risk us not shipping some of the more advanced features that we are working on in this product. We had hoped to release it all as open source but I just don't think that' going to be possible now, unless we somehow magically start getting a ton of orders.

Maybe they should call it the original social network. :p

Did you know your name is an Aptronym? Especially for this post.

It would be hugely amusing if one of these projects announced (even in jest) that they were would continue to issue patches for XP after EOL.

We are sending maven to mars? Thank goodness for small mercies.

An engineer at NASA told me it's not really that great at producing something called binaries for CI, assembly:single notwithstanding. No idea what he meant, but he seemed to know what he's talking about.

I imagine the mission will come off without a hitch as long as our network connection to it remains up at all times to receive all the useful verbose reporting it gives us.

That's proof he is lying. Even the developer's of netbeans don't use netbeans.