> If you co-found with a non-bestie, not only are you taking all that risk on yourself
I co-founded a company with my best friend in high school. He screwed me 6 months into the biz. As an individual, the fires of entrepreneurship completely changed him.
I spend 1-2 hrs in the morning reading industry news, research, and studies. The rest of the day (5 hrs) I refine the framework I would follow when/if I get a job.
I view it as an outstanding opportunity to learn and prepare. I did something similar 10 years ago during the dotcom crash. When biz was slow, I spent my time learning about strategic planning. It paid dividends for the next decade.
I've been searching for an opportunity for 1 year now, so the framework is quite robust.
The target position I've been looking for is Ecommerce Manager. I've been very close to landing a few jobs, and the reason I haven't been hired was because I'm "overqualified" or "too much horsepower".
From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial -
A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge).
Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use this for business you'll still need to pay. Unless i'm misreading it, "Open source but you'll still have to go through our platform" is pretty disingenuous.
I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from.
It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me.
I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS code is that you can self-host, and/or modify it for business use if you so choose.
To me this would be better served by advertising "We like you so much, we're giving away access to our service for free for noncommercial and test use, and opening up the code to the library so you can see how it works", but that's less interesting as click bait.
Maybe i'm just mis-reading the whole thing and you can self-host.
It seems to me that you can self-host. There is reasonable installation documentation at http://mortar-framework.org/. You just have to set up the infrastructure yourself, which you would have had to do anyway if they didn't offer hosting. It also seems that you can use their platform for only the cost of AWS if you don't mind open-sourcing your recommendation engine, which sounds terrific if your project is itself open source. Honestly, I can't find any qualms with this. Their business model seems to be that you will probably pay them $100/year (or $500/year for team access) because it's easier/cheaper than DIY.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm in agreement with your opinions regarding false promises of open source, and also that this is increasingly a problem. However, I don't think that actually applies here. Specifics:
1. Everything in this github repository (https://github.com/mortardata/mortar-recsys) appears to be truly open - it's just a bunch of pig scripts, some java UDF definitions, and some python management code. There doesn't appear to be any dependencies on proprietary MortarData anything. All the code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
2. The blog post states: " You can run this code anywhere. It’s built on widely-adopted open source technologies—Hadoop, Pig, and Python. But we think you’ll want to use our platform."
If you want a relatively simple way to provision a Hadoop cluster locally, you may want to try out Ferry (http://ferry.opencore.io). It's based off Docker, so in theory, you could also write a nice Dockerfile to deploy Mortar's recommendation engine. (full disclosure, I'm the author of Ferry).
To my mind it depends a little on what functionality is behind the account. If this is a huge chunk of functionality, that presently depends on their infrastructure but doesn't have to, then I think that's fine (though certainly enough to self-host would be better). If this is basically a thin wrapper and all the actual functionality is in their proprietary server code, then it's hugely disingenuous.
The code does not depend on the infrastructure. You can execute the Pig code locally on your machine, or on your own hadoop cluster. This really is a 'free' give-away of code.
I can't help but feel that this is akin to complaining that someone gave you the cart, but not the horse. You can buy or build your own horse, or rent someone else's. It doesn't stop the cart from being freely given.
The code is all released under Apache, but is all the code needed to use this thing released? If the parent poster is accurate that a user still needs to engage with their platform, this conversation is just pedantics and sophistry over what "open" means.
You can run the code on your local machine, on Amazon ElasticMapReduce, or on your own Hadoop cluster. This really is a give-away of useful open source code.
It reads like "open source but not free to make proprietary." First, it's awesome just to see source as something to learn from. Second, it seems reasonable they don't want people forking, modifying then profiting from their work without contributing back to it - either by also releasing source or by paying.
It's opensourced under Apache 2.0 license. That means, it's free as in freedom, with all the legal ability to be forked and profited from.
AFAIK, the only substantial difference between Apache 2.0 and GPLv3 is that APL2 is not copyleft license. That means, one's fork is not even required to remain opensourced (as far as it contains a reference to original APL-licensed version).
So either Mortar opensourced some feature-crippled fragment of their platform, and it relies on features from their proprietary platform heavily; or the statement of requirement Mortar account is property of the Tutorial's approach, not the opensourced code itself.
I use LinkedIn's news feed to build my personal brand among my connections, and to keep my face in front of some connections with the power to hire me. In general, the news feed is full of boring articles, but that's simply because the people posting them are trying to reinforce their brand image of "boring".
I've been sharing 1 article a day for the past 6 months, in addition to responding to group questions. Since my objective is branding, it's not easy to quantify results. But anecdotally, some contacts have mentioned to me that they enjoy what I've been sharing.
Be genuinely interested to hear what others think about this. I have contacts who do this (often sharing links) and it makes me cringe - I'm quite capable of discovering my own news - and I find it a bit too attention-seeking. I tend to hide such people. But, I am a grumpy old man these days :-)
I would find original content, infrequently posted and of decent quality, much more impressive.
I guess like so many other things this can be done well, or done badly, and there's a skill in doing it well.
Why would you voluntarily give Amazon all of your sales data? They'll aggregate it, mine it, then use it to optimize their store / pricing / products. At least with PayPal, I know they won't be using my sales data against me.
You didn't read what I said. If you're selling cheaper socks, you're going to lose to amazon and walmart. If you sell new innovative products, you aren't going to lose to them.
Also, with paypal, they get your sales data, sell it to others, AND then just keep your money and close your account.
Yes, but web development is a mature industry and becoming commoditized. It's very difficult to differentiate based on quality, as most clients choose based on price. Source: I've been a web developer since 1995.
It's not really an industry I would recommend to anyone.
The only area where there will be growth is front-end development. I would only work "in-house", as opposed to working for agencies.
Success is often the result of timing or luck. Any lessons learned here would probably be incorrect. With failure, it's easier to identify the correct causes.
Corporate sites usually have rigid branding guidelines that define the message and imaging the site should convey. Startup sites usually have much looser guidelines. It's a lot easier to design something awesome when you're not as constrained.
I co-founded a company with my best friend in high school. He screwed me 6 months into the biz. As an individual, the fires of entrepreneurship completely changed him.