Someone posted a critic of shapado on stackexchange a few hours ago. So I thought I would post a reply to answer it over there but for some weird reason, I keep getting an error message with a cute kitten
I thought it was temporary but as it turned out it didn’t get fixed so I asked some friends to post the message for me and it didn’t work for them either. Maybe they are censoring the word “shapado” or something, I really hope they’re not but if they are that’s really lame. The site seems to be working great for everyone else so…
Update: ok, it finally worked after a few hours of trying :)
Anyway, here is the post in question in case you care, you can try to post it for me over there, maybe you’ll get lucky:
Hi,
Shapado dev here. I’m sorry you took it that way @debug (thanks for you private feedback btw ;)). We’re just 3 guys who started something for fun as a hobby, we’re flattered though if you think we’ve accomplished something as good as the fogcreek employees.
As you know though, it can all be used by anyone for free and we’re not being paid for it, so that seems like a pretty good gift to the community.
Some companies can’t or don’t want to use hosted services for privacy reasons (eg. a DMCA request would force Fogcreek to give all the data to the government and make it public) or others reasons (AT&T uses Shapado internally as they like Rails).
Also some organizations (non profit for example) just don’t have the money to pay for the licenses.
For all these reasons and because having a free/open source alternative is always a good thing, we think it has a pretty good reason to exist.
About the copying thing, that’s how science and art work. Nothing gets created, everything gets copied and evolves from that. Especially in the software world, eg. linux (used by google and other) is a “knock off” of unix. StackOverFlow is a mixed “knock off” of Digg, Ask Slashdot and Yahoo Answers, and that’s fine. As for us adding new features, we’re doing this as a pet project so we concentrate on the basics for now.
For the record though we do have a couple of extra features: latex formulas in our editor, i18n, widgets, themes, code highlighting, a RESTful API, using your own domain and more that I’m forgetting.
Cheers,
Pat
Works for me said on 2010-02-18 07:55:10 UTC:
Your link works for me without problems - and you even got friendly answers.
And for the StackOvxerflow guys the principle sticks: It's almost always better to be the original; and being copied spreads the word about you.
patcito said on 2010-02-18 14:31:34 UTC:
I'm not saying my links don't work, I said posting my comment doesn't work (the part that starts with **Hi, Shapado dev here...**). Try to copy and past that post here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4381/ and see what happens.
Roland Studer said on 2010-02-18 16:25:44 UTC:
I tried posting the text, and yes, I acutally got the error.
This is very strange.
However your site is linked in the question, and it's also mentioned here:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/so-clones
Not sure, if this is realy on purpose, but it's very strange…