Drew Chadwick DeVault / ddevault / SirCmpwn - Opinionated white-male-guilt-ridden software developer. Cancelled Hyprland and slandered it as "toxic" and transphobic. Hates X11 users and Hacker News. Lolicon.

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

Wtf? You shipped the servers? Had the servers insured, they lost them and you write it off? Drew proves once again what a manlet he is.

How is this even possible? Even if they only shipped five servers after disposing of the others, that's still easily 10k+ in money that went down /dev/null. How do you ship something worth this much and not have some kind of contact? Did he use the cheapest chinkshit company he could find or what?

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

And is SourceHut really large enough to justify having tens of thousands of dollars worth of servers? I would have expected him to be using AWS EC2 or similar. He's not very good at business, is he?

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

And is SourceHut really large enough to justify having tens of thousands of dollars worth of servers?

I'd think a single server would suffice, but he does offer program building and integration testing and the like.

I would have expected him to be using AWS EC2 or similar.

Come now, I think Drew is both competent and proud enough to have an infrastructure that doesn't go down when Amazon Web Services sneezes. Besides, he does more than WWW stuff, and I'm to understand that gets much more expensive quickly.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Come now, I think Drew is both competent and proud enough to have an infrastructure that doesn't go down when Amazon Web Services sneezes. Besides, he does more than WWW stuff, and I'm to understand that gets much more expensive quickly.

Yeah. I'm not saying that AWS is a good choice, just that it's a much better one than spending a small fortune on servers that you don't need.

 

[DavidS877]

Yeah. I'm not saying that AWS is a good choice, just that it's a much better one than spending a small fortune on servers that you don't need.

It would have been hilarious when they were DDOSed and had to go out of business because their AWS bill was too high.

 

[Hồ Chí Minh]

And is SourceHut really large enough to justify having tens of thousands of dollars worth of servers? I would have expected him to be using AWS EC2 or similar. He's not very good at business, is he?

SourceHut has a CI; that's probably most the most expensive part. Some of the git stuff is probably also somewhat resource-intensive. It's more than just some webshit JS "app".

Renting that from AWS or similar is very expensive.

$50k of servers spread out over several years is much cheaper. Spread out over 4 years that's $12,500 per year, or $1,050/month. It's not that much. Any "cloud service" would easily be triple or more of that for what he offers.

Downside is that you have physical servers to worry about that may get lost in the post. But even taking that in to account: he probably saved money versus using AWS.

You may have heard that we also had to part ways with one of our staff members recently. This reduces our headcount to two. For the time being we will not be hiring a replacement, but our near-future plans are achievable with our current headcount. Though we usually aim for transparency to the maximum extent possible, we will not be sharing further details about this departure, as a matter of reasonable privacy.

This seems to imply there's more going on than just financial reasons?

I would be pretty miffed if I was let go because of financials and then my employer says "our financials are not so great and we had to part ways with a staff member, but we're not sharing details for privacy reasons".

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Yeah. I'm not saying that AWS is a good choice, just that it's a much better one than spending a small fortune on servers that you don't need.

Well, @davids877 and @Hồ Chí Minh really took the words out of me. It's pretty likely that if he'd used AWS he would've incurred more than a few tens of thousands of dollars in unintended costs by now. It's insane, and should be criminal, how Amazon doesn't let people put spending limits in place. The Google bullshit alone would've bankrupted him.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

This seems to imply there's more going on than just financial reasons?

I would be pretty miffed if I was let go because of financials and then my employer says "our financials are not so great and we had to part ways with a staff member, but we're not sharing details for privacy reasons".

Maybe it's because they used Jones' Big Ass Truck Rental and Storage* for moving $50K of servers. Or maybe that was why they were fired, it was their idea. Or maybe they just stole the servers and vanished into the night. Anyway, we can't tell you why! WRITE OFF!

*

 

[DavidS877]

Maybe it's because they used Jones' Big Ass Truck Rental and Storage* for moving $50K of servers. Or maybe that was why they were fired, it was their idea. Or maybe they just stole the servers and vanished into the night. Anyway, we can't tell you why! WRITE OFF!

*

Might have hired one of the crews from Shipping Wars. Just strapped it to a giant flatbed, took a tight turn and they flew off into a ditch and didn't even notice.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

SourceHut has a CI; that's probably most the most expensive part. Some of the git stuff is probably also somewhat resource-intensive. It's more than just some webshit JS "app".

Renting that from AWS or similar is very expensive.

$50k of servers spread out over several years is much cheaper. Spread out over 4 years that's $12,500 per year, or $1,050/month. It's not that much. Any "cloud service" would easily be triple or more of that for what he offers.

Downside is that you have physical servers to worry about that may get lost in the post. But even taking that in to account: he probably saved money versus using AWS.

Well, I'm doubtful that SourceHut is big enough to warrant more than one or two dedicated servers. It looks like there's about 6,000 repos, of which the vast majority are going to be inactive. SH is "pay what you want" (of course it is), with the minimum level being $20 a year - that means 625 paying customers just to cover his capital costs.
The whole thing is a vanity project.

 

[Hồ Chí Minh]

Well, I'm doubtful that SourceHut is big enough to warrant more than one or two dedicated servers. It looks like there's about 6,000 repos, of which the vast majority are going to be inactive. SH is "pay what you want" (of course it is), with the minimum level being $20 a year - that means 625 paying customers just to cover his capital costs.
The whole thing is a vanity project.

Run a CI and git hosting for 100 projects that actually see use and get back to me how many servers you needed for that. It's going to be more than one. The Kubernetes project spends over $200k per MONTH (not a typo) on CI costs. On AWS of course because they're cloud-addicted morons. Running a CI costs more than you think if you want performance that's not on the same level as 1998 shared PHP webhost.

Sourcehut's revenue was $132k in 2022: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2023-03-27-2022-financial-report – he's not getting hugely rich, but making more than you'd think. You could have spent about 20 seconds looking that up instead of saying something completely incorrect.

Drew is an idiot for many reasons, and a huge gaping asshole for even more reasons. But he does actually roughly know what he's doing. He's not completely incompetent as you seem to assume.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Run a CI and git hosting for 100 projects that actually see use and get back to me how many servers you needed for that. It's going to be more than one. The Kubernetes project spends over $200k per MONTH (not a typo) on CI costs. On AWS of course because they're cloud-addicted morons. Running a CI costs more than you think if you want performance that's not on the same level as 1998 shared PHP webhost.

I know CI is expensive. It's also fairly incidental to the project. Few people would care if he got rid of it, and he'd save a lot of money.

Sourcehut's revenue was $132k in 2022: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2023-03-27-2022-financial-report – he's not getting hugely rich, but making more than you'd think. You could have spent about 20 seconds looking that up instead of saying something completely incorrect.

What did I post that was incorrect? There's currently about 6,000 public repos on SH.
Thank you for this, though - I was trying to find it on the Dutch equivalent of Companies House. I never thought he'd be daft enough to post it himself.

This is the interesting bit...

In total, SourceHut received $367,810 in revenue from consulting engagements in 2022.

SourceHut would have made a heavy loss if it only made money from subscriptions. So like I said, it's a vanity project.

He's not completely incompetent as you seem to assume.

Lol. How many days was his business down because of the supposed "DDoS" - eight?

 

[skunt]

This isn't an interesting post but it brought me a little joy. Remember all the hubbub drew tried to create around redis, how he created a fork and tried to convince the maintainers at valkey (github issue) to sign up to codeberg (???) so they could discuss a merger on redicts home soil?

At the time of posting, redict hasn't had a commit in two months, haven't closed an issue in three months and have a staggering, 0 open pull requests. I wouldn't call it dead quite yet, but it's basically on deaths door and nobody seems to care.

Valkey meanwhile is uh, well, they're killing it and have articles in the register and phoronix and those are just articles from this month too. They also have some kind of deal with the linux foundation. TL;DR is they're basically the redis replacement and it's not even close.

Anyways that's it. It's fun to check up on things sometimes. Congrats drew!

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2024-06-04-status-and-plans/ - https://archive.ph/eNdAv
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2024-06-12-infrastructure-updates/ - https://archive.ph/gSxBT

they got scammed out of some servers. i haven't finished reading it yet but you guys will enjoy it

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

Yeah. I'm not saying that AWS is a good choice, just that it's a much better one than spending a small fortune on servers that you don't need.

Drew is an idiot for many reasons, and a huge gaping asshole for even more reasons. But he does actually roughly know what he's doing. He's not completely incompetent as you seem to assume.

AWS (or Azure or GCP) is almost always the wrong choice for any startup. They intentionally hide a lot of costs. Sure you might think you're saving a lot using RDS and not setting up your own DB backups/failover (and probably hiring a full time DBA), but if you can put in the effort or find reasonable open source management tools, the savings of staying off a cloud service shows itself after a few years of up time.

Almost every shop I've been in that used a hosted service, also had half their shit still in their own data centers. Then you get massive costs for Direct Connect or MegaPort or whatever to bridge the two. They were also constantly cleaning up old volumes, dead EC2 instances, over-provisioned/underutilized services .. even when platform teams kept trying to lock down things so people couldn't buy stuff willy nilly, they'd still somehow end up with $300k of new barely used or unused shit every year.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Drew's been posting his list of "biggest threats to FOSS" (it's not very interesting). But...

(https://x.com/vaxryy/status/1808577271932072042, https://archive.is/JTcEj)

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

Drew's been posting his list of "biggest threats to FOSS" (it's not very interesting).

5. The Free Software Foundation. #hottake

The one thing all of these issues have in common is that the FSF has no answers for them. The EUPL and MPL are doing a better job of facilitating copyleft than the GPL family. Savannah isn't a match for Codeberg, let alone GitHub. Most egregiously, the FSF has utterly failed to address diversity and social issues, especially sexism, and with RMS's position restored and maintained at the helm that is never going to change.

He just cannot let it go. This man is fucking obsessed with RMS.

 

[Markass the Worst]

He just cannot let it go. This man is fucking obsessed with RMS.

Looks like Drew hates the GPL now, never thought I would see the day.

He also calls Bryan Lunduke a "right-wing conspiracy theorist" that is a "threat to FOSS":

source (a)

Drew must be upset at Bryan Lunduke's recent coverage on topics like how NixOS got taken over by trannies. (a) I don't know how that is a "conspiracy theory" but it isn't. It literally happened.

And even if I grant the premise that Lunduke is a "right-wing conspiracy theorist", how is that a threat to FOSS in any way? Arguably trannies are a bigger threat to FOSS.

 

[The Real Slim Shady]

Looks like Drew hates the GPL now, never thought I would see the day.

I never bothered to read the source code of his toy projects, what is he using instead?

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Drew's been posting his list of "biggest threats to FOSS" (it's not very interesting). But...
View attachment 6154033
(https://x.com/vaxryy/status/1808577271932072042, https://archive.is/JTcEj)

I agree with his first two and a half points.

Looks like Drew hates the GPL now, never thought I would see the day.

No.

2. Open washing, which is to say the proliferation of licenses that look FOSS if you squint but don't work if you look closer, and practices related to these licenses. Here we have big players like Elastic, Redis, MongoDB, and numerous smaller cases as well. The practice of building off of the lavish advantages of being in the FOSS ecosystem, then pulling the rug and seeking exclusive commercial monopolization of the end result.

To address this we need to better educate people on how money and free software can co-exist in a way which does not threaten FOSS, and for people to learn and *grok* the social and economic dynamics of free software. The commercialization of FOSS is not a bad thing -- so long as the *critical* provisions that all users are equally entitled to share that wealth and capitalize on it on equal terms is upheld.

Moverover, we need to re-discover reciprocal licenses like GPL and EUPL and hold copyrights in common between all stakeholders. Which is why you should never sign a CLA!

Oh, and on this subject: AWS is not really a threat to FOSS, if anything it's mostly been a boon for us. Any time someone cites AWS while taking any of the four freedoms away from you, you should start asking some pointed questions.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

Nobody tell this faggot about XWayland.