Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

I was torn as to whether to link to the site or the blog post introducing it. Here's the blog post with more info: http://neosmart.net/blog/2013/worried-google-will-kill-your-...

The site is still in the early stages, more features are coming in very soon. Some geeky info: powered by ASP.NET MVC, S3, RDS, EC2, CloudFront and soon, Redis for real-time analytics (currently a custom in-memory data structure). Backend was implemented in around a week of non-stop work.

We've been using FeedBurner since 2004, and were huge fans of one of the coolest startups to come from our hometown, Chicago. We also know what it means to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, our own feed has over 600,000 subscribers constantly making requests for content (don't ask). As the blogpost explains, we would love to take this further and delve into the intricate world of feed indexing but want to take the time to gauge demand and get a feel for the bigger picture. Feedback is most welcome.

Sample "prettified" feeds for those so inclined, ranging from original feeds that provide full content, brief summary, to titles only: http://feeds.feedsnap.com/neosmart http://feeds.feedsnap.com/bbcnews http://feeds.feedsnap.com/hackernews

> FeedSnap's goal is simple: to provide a reliable, capable, and actively maintained FeedBurner replacement for your beloved RSS feed.

In keeping with that goal, is there any chance that you will open source the work you've done under a GPLv3 license? Perhaps the largest problem is that every service claims to be "reliable, capable, and actively maintained" until it isn't.

We'd definitely release the source if we were to scuttle it. But not GPL (especially not v3), more like MIT or BSD :)

Would you mind expanding upon why you presumably prefer GPLv2 over v3? Additionally, if you prefer the MIT/BSD licensing model, why not choose Apache v2?

Apache is fine, too (though there aren't any patents involved so it has no real advantage). Apache v2, BSD, MIT, are all in the same open spirit - Apache is just more explicit about what it gives away.

It's important to understand that when FSF talks about "freedom" they explicitly mean keeping the users free - not the developers. As a developer, I'm personally biased towards being free to other developers, and I think GPL (v2 and esp. v3) are very much pro-user at the cost of being anti-developer.

> It's important to understand that when FSF talks about "freedom" they explicitly mean keeping the users free - not the developers. As a developer, I'm personally biased towards being free to other developers, and I think GPL (v2 and esp. v3) are very much pro-user at the cost of being anti-developer.

I don't think that's what the FSF means when they talk about freedom. Freedom is about keeping everyone free--developers and users alike. Copyleft licenses ensure that all derivative works be subject to the same licensing terms as the original work. It's a way to protect the self-perpetuating nature of free software that more permissive licenses fail to achieve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com