PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by Cthulhu_ on Thursday April 13, 2017 @06:52AM (#14105747)

The main problem for developers is that getting your company to pay for something like developer tools can be very hard and a long project. Ideally every team gets a budget and a credit card to do as they see fit, but in practice a lot of (especially bigger) companies have a whole acquisition process. It's not uncommon for the hours spent in getting a license for e.g. an editor to be far more expensive than the product itself. I believe this is often highlighted again when Sublime Text is in the news again.

This as opposed to open source tooling which has no such hurdles.

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by taude on Thursday April 13, 2017 @07:32AM (#14105911)

Why do you think open source tooling has no such hurdles? At these same "larger" companies, they're going to have an open source review board, and legal involved for each open source product you want to use.

Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by hackits on Thursday April 13, 2017 @08:35AM (#14106239)

Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self.

Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by nulagrithom on Thursday April 13, 2017 @10:37AM (#14107298)

This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script.

"You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too."

"Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?"

"Well, yes... But it's currently not working. We've got a ticket in to fix it."

That was months ago. Yesterday it broke and there was no alert. There's also still no logs.

Gotta be careful about that "open source" stuff though.

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by lurker456 on Thursday April 13, 2017 @12:26PM (#14108429)

Open source doesn't allow you to pass the buck. Commercial software with support contracts does. There is also the "look how much we're paying! it must be good" factor.

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by brazzledazzle on Friday April 14, 2017 @01:17AM (#14112832)

Many companies are paid handsomely to take the blame.

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by taude on Thursday April 13, 2017 @03:44PM (#14110313)

They're also afraid of the abomination you quickly scripted together that the future-you, who no longer works for them, then has to try and figure out.

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by nulagrithom on Thursday April 13, 2017 @04:53PM (#14110834)

ffs it's just FTP. All it needed was a scheduled task that called winscp pointed to a file containing a handful of flat FTP commands. If the guy who replaces me can't sort that out, how's he going to sort through my code?

Besides, now it's some abomination wrapped inside a proprietary program that doesn't work right in the first place, only this time we're out the $x,xxx licensing costs and the entire process is opaque, with absolutely zero hope of sorting it out on our own. That's not a huge gain...

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by jonny_eh on Thursday April 13, 2017 @10:18AM (#14107108)

and then you can't search stackoverflow for help, compared to using something like postgres

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by brazzledazzle on Friday April 14, 2017 @01:21AM (#14112841)

Is it fair to say that kind of people that want to pay for an SFTP client for an automated process probably aren't doing much digging around on stackoverflow?

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Re:PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer by nailer on Thursday April 13, 2017 @10:33AM (#14107263)

A good way to address this is have a tools budget.

Product Manager has $X per team member. Is encouraged to coordinate purchases and pool purchases together for licenses. Licenses can be proprietary or Open Source licenses X, Y and Z.

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