ibdthor

I think they're onto one of the next big models: democratizing knowledge that's been traditionally gatekept, hard to reach, understand, or make decisions with. I'm fascinated to see where products like this end up.

The blog posts might get a little long if we prefaced all of them with a description of Light Table, but hopefully lighttable.com can provide you with all the information you're looking for :)

You are definitely correct that some of the aversion is a knee jerk reaction and misunderstanding, but that aside, the MIT license is very end user friendly, more understood than the GPL, and more permissive to the end user, plus we kept hearing from folks that that's what they wanted, so we switched.

We were hearing concerns that the CA was worded in our favor and was one-way, in that people could contribute and we could take their work and commercialize it down the road without open sourcing it.

I know Chris already responded to some of your concerns, but I'd like to weigh in briefly as well.

> By bringing investors on board, and promising Hacker News they're going to change the world

a16z constitutes the majority of our investment, and Chris Dixon at a16z is rather well equipped to help us tackle this problem. It has also given us access to a rather impressive network of very smart people who can help us. Yes, there is a trade-off in that our investors have a say in what we do, but given the small number of investors, and who they are individually, there is a low probability of micromanagement from them. Secondly, we never promised Hacker News that we're going to change the world; we said we have some ambitious ideas, and that we wanted to pursue them. Might they change the world? Sure. Might we also die trying? Absolutely. That's a risk inherent to... well, everything. Certainly a lot of things worth doing.

> The fact that the LT team is giving up on Light Table/I think the LT team should have worked themselves into a crying, bleeding, starving mess

The last time we had office hours with pg about LT, we didn't exactly leave with a warm fuzzy feeling about continuing work on the project. But we did, for another year, spending the remainder of the Kickstarter money and approaching the end of the runway, staying as lean as possible, and continuing to develop a product that pg, James Lindenbaum, et al, all regarded as a nonviable business. We may have to agree to disagree on how plausible it is to make an open source IDE a commercial success, but there was plenty of crying and bleeding before we came to work on Eve.

At that point, it became what Jamie aptly described as a matter of return on effort. There isn't much sensibility in spending countless hours to solve the wrong problem, and running out of money didn't strike us as the optimal way to continue working on a problem we genuinely cared about. Instead, once LT became open source, we forged ahead into an area that Chris Dixon called a "Vietnam" of software, and while Eve may be particularly difficult, it brought us new funds precisely so we don't have to give up.

> I truly hope they succeed

Thank you, so do we :)

This is absolutely spot-on correct. Your life is so far from set in stone at age 21 that you won't believe how different 21 is from even age 25, just a few years down the road. The grass will always seem a bit greener elsewhere, but that's human nature, especially when you've just graduated college. When I graduated, I had a top notch degree (like it matters), but I didn't even have a good job that paid the bills easily. It was what I thought I really wanted to work in, what I thought I should be doing, so I took a huge pay cut to be a low-level researcher. I was so jealous of my friends who graduated and took a "boring job" that paid triple what mine did, who got benefits and bonuses, and did exactly what @anigbrowl said - they banked money for a few years and it set them up for so much success. They fostered their own interests on the side, paid off any debt or loans they had, got cars or houses, and saved up their money. Without fail, all of those friends found jobs they enjoyed far more (some of them through connections at that boring job they didn't like in the first place), jobs that let them have a greater impact on the world, and jobs that were more in line with their interests as they evolved through their 20s. And again without fail, none of them accurately predicted the direction their lives and passions would go from the time they were 21 until now.

I did the same thing, but without the added benefit of making any money like you're doing now. I had such a strong notion of what I wanted to do, and as I spent more time messing around with ideas in my spare time and learning more about what I wanted for myself, those notions changed so radically that I went from stem cell research to IDEs in a matter of years. The thing that helped me the most were the people around me. I was able to talk out all my thoughts and worries and anxieties. I was able to share in other people's interests and passions to see if maybe those were mine too. It made me feel like I wasn't alone, like things weren't hopeless, and like I had the potential to be extraordinary if I wanted to be. Ultimately the things that have truly begun to define my life came from utterly unexpected places, and almost entirely from the cast of friends and family around me.

Hang in there, the path gets clearer.