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Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

G-Wan interests me however it's closed-source and the creator seems a bit.. well.. 'something'. Elitist, perhaps.

I've noticed he turns a number of things into mini-rants. There used to be a rant on the download page about how it's closed-source because open-source is actually less free, blah blah blah.

It just seems.. off. I think in most cases it's better to go with a project that has a big and stable community.

I think this post sums him up quite well: http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/247/

He's a bit too angry for me to be able to trust him.

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He might just have strong opinions based on his experience.

Certainly you could level most of your post against the author of Varnish, but then you read his rants and feel that they're valid, and you look at his code and it's some of the best I've seen, and you look at his track record and who is using Varnish and are won over.

Rants aren't bad things, I want highly opinionated leaders of projects to be good steers for them. You just need to decide whether you agree with the rant (and the direction of the project you could project from those views) and make your own decision on whether to use the software.

As rants are usually subjective, there's going to be a load of people out there who will want to use the software on those terms.

Sure, there's nothing wrong with rants. I agree. I wouldn't be using Linux if I didn't use software by creators who rant a lot ;-)

There's just something off about G-WAN, something different. I can't place it exactly. It just makes me not want to trust it.

Agree with all the points here.

Most of all, there's a cost to switching to G-Wan. It's not a zero cost. So as long as that cost is greater than the speed/load benefits, it won't gain serious support. And it doesn't help that the creator attacks and insults people who dare challenge him.

Right now, G-Wan can't serve any of my sites without serious work and modifications. The claimed load capabilities aren't nearly enough to make me switch from Nginx. For me, Nginx handles anything I throw at it AND it's very easy to implement. At our size, buying servers twice the size would still cost a fraction of implementing G-Wan across all sites.

So really, this "comparative" benchmark needs to include 1) time/effort to implement, 2) ability to run existing websites, and 3) community support.

The same things were said about Rails when I first started using it in 2003. Well, except for the speed part. :) Rails adoption was almost entirely for new projects back then. Rails had the advantage of Ruby, which was a great way to bring in newer developers. C might not be as attractive to today's equivalent, but I know many people who love Rails but are ready for something different. G-Wan seems to solve some of the hard parts of C programming for this usage model.

The closed source nature of G-Wan bothers me, and may prove to be an insurmountable problem, but otherwise I think the ideas are pretty great. It brings me back to the days of qmail and NSAPI...both of which were awesome in their own ways.

Wow, seconded.

Freaky benchmarks + closed source + that attitude => closes tab

Nginx recently had a security advisory, about a hole which was found by a third party. I doubt this would happen with G-WAN, which leaves me feeling scared.

I can't just trust a binary from someone which states that "protecting the NSA from injecting backdoors because it's too hard to track who put them in" is a valid reason for not open-sourcing the thing

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