Classic "two masters" problem.

This was from the CTO last week: "This work won't be landing anywhere until sometime next year and it'll be landing in our Cloud 2 offering first." So the OSS is definitely a second-class citizen. And now that they've dropped all DevRel activity, don't expect much attention for OSS Developers and users.

Quite the contrary, we're finishing up packaging of the OSS version now to make it as easy as possible for you to get it and we're assembled a new team focused on getting OSS 2.0 released.

We continue to support all users, including OSS users, in our public Slack and Discourse, as well as Github. We have not "dropped all DevRel" activity.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Influx laid off pretty much the entire DevRel team in the last 6 months, but ok.

This is true, and has certainly been painful for us and puts more work on those of us who are still working on community and devrel, but we're still doing it.

In fact we've got one of our Developer Advocates doing a live broadcast right now over at https://www.influxdata.com/time-series-meetup/virtual-2020

Well, guess I know to never use Influx as a startup

Why is that? It takes minimal effort to get it up and running and you can either self-host or use the SaaS offering on any of the major clouds. There's even a free tier on the SaaS your startup can use that won't cost you a dime until your usage becomes significant.

Because the VPE sounds like the corporate sort of person who would not prioritize the things I'd want them to as a customer.

That kinda hurts.

There are 100k's of happy InfluxDB users -- untold millions of completely open source Telegraf deployments doing meaningful work for people -- integrated into our products and our competitors' products. We make the vast majority of our codebase public under liberal OSS licenses.

And we'll keep listening and learning how to do more.

... off to see if I can change my internal slack handle to @corporatetool. Unless there's a policy against that ;-)

Hey, yeah, sorry, I've been meaning all day to go back and fix that. Really wasn't right.

Just struck a nerve that reminded me of some leaders at a previous gig who made things a little less sensible.

I apologise, and you definitely don't deserve it :-(

I don't think anybody who knows Ryan would describe him as "the corporate sort of person" :)

He was giving you an honest assessment of what was going on, not sugar-coated or wrapped in corporate speak. The work he described on our SaaS offering was directly tied to what our current and potential customers wanted.

Your issue is that they are prioritizing paying customers over giving you a free product.

I don't think that's fair given they are still a startup.