People's revealed preference is that they do not care until they get bitten. And then they care very much.
So we can and should do better than the bare minimum, and better than 'what users ask for' before they get bitten.
That you do not care is a different story altogether, but consider that if you align your users' interests with your own that you probably stand a much better chance of success than if you do not.
Sure, 'greed is good' and all that but in the end, company data being sold in bankruptcy proceedings is simply bad, companies giving several days warning before shutting down (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770257) are not helping anybody (not even themselves), and Yahoo!'s shutting down Geocities still reverberates around the web (especially the way they went about it, for a pittance they could have continued to at least store the data).
My inbox fills up daily with people that thought they had an agreement with one of the largest companies on the web and it turned out they got hurt badly.
Big or small, it does not matter.
We are all operating by the grace of our users and those people that put their own interests ahead of those of the users are hurting all of us.
Maintaining this sort of integrity is not a cost, it is a long term benefit, for everyone.
When you use words like "code of conduct" and "this sort of integrity" assumptively, as you have here, you invite criticism for an idea that would otherwise be almost so universally accepted as to be anodyne.
On just a second reading, I see the following issues:
* 1.3.2 ("edit" information) will be construed as a mandate that information never be archived (it needs to be "live" to be edited). This is for instance an issue with Twitter, which does not make it easy to find (let alone edit) Tweets from last year.
* 1.6 (least information required) precludes business models that exchange lowered (or no) fees in exchange for user data.
* 2.2.1 puts, in a "startup code of ethics", legal roadblocks to selling companies (do you or I know what is or isn't legally reasonable to promise in something like this? In lots of cases, a lawsuit can easily kill a deal.
* 2.3 puts obligations on a hypothetical third party company to run an extra service
* 2.3.1 requires a six month shutdown notice, by which standard half the companies announced on HN would potentially be required to notify their users at launch.
* 2.3.2 requires, for no apparent reason, startups to open source their software at wind-down --- never mind the fact that most funded startups can't do that, since they don't own the code.
* 2.3.4 says, direct quote: "If our shutdown is involuntarily (for instance, because of bankruptcy) the bankruptcy trustee will be bound by these terms"
Actually here I just stopped reading.
If a startup launched with this in their promise to user signups, I'd laud them. But the person who tries to bind other startups to these ideas under the aegis of "this is what integrity means" probably deserves some flak.
Think of it as a starting point, a first rough version of what I think should be present in a code that binds start-ups to their users to balance the scales and to make sure that people that run companies realize that they have rights, but so do their users.
As for 'eating your own dogfood', I fully intend to subscribe all the services I run to the code of ethics, and I have absolutely no problem with that limiting my options.
And if your views on integrity do not coincide with mine that's perfectly ok, but it is really easy to hammer any idea into the ground, let's see your alternative, something that you think would be an improvement over the status quo that you would find acceptable.
Jacquesm: Just to illustrate how you have a tendency to Specify unreasonable upfront restrictions, your own code prohibits you from correcting some of these errors in your code. Even though this is an 0.1 version, it requires all future versions to be equally or more restrictive. So you will have to live with your "first rough version" forever.
That is exactly as stupid as promising to keep the 0.1 version of your api active forever no matter what even if a serious security vulnerability is discovered.
I think that an update of the first rough version before it is adopted for practical reasons is perfectly ok, but once adopted it should not be possible to water it down by adopting later versions. That opens the door to adopting a version without restrictions at all and that would render the whole thing pointless.
Keeping your API active if there are security vulnerabilities is interpreting the thing to the letter, the idea is that you will fix the vulnerability and that you will continue to provide the functionality at the same time. If there is an unreasonable conflict between the two (and I fail to see how that could be possible except for very contrived cases) then there probably will be a way to resolve that conflict to everybody's satisfaction.
When you write things like "bankruptcy trustee will be bound by these terms", it becomes hard to argue that other people are unfairly interpreting it "to the letter".
As for the bankruptcy situation, that's one of those cases where there is absolutely no loss for the start-up, after all, the people that found the start-up have nothing to gain once they go bankrupt, but users have everything to gain because if their data gets sold the buyer will be able to do just about anything he wants with the data if the conditions have not been created ahead of time in such a way that they survive the transition.
So, from the point of view of the start-up owner and the users that's a win-win, it may reduce the value of the assets during a bankruptcy liquidation but that's an acceptable trade-off in my opinion.
The issue with your bankruptcy clause isn't its reasonableness (although I personally don't think it's reasonable); the issue is that it's probably not enforceable. I'm not particularly interested in amateurishly delving into the nature of executory and non-executory contracts between freemium startups and their users, but just know that this is not a simple niche in US law.
I'm a very arrogant guy (really), but not so much that I feel like I can come up with a code of conduct for startups on my own. I've got no alternative to offer you. I don't think we need one and I'd bet the market is going to agree.
Comments
It's voluntary :)
People's revealed preference is that they do not care until they get bitten. And then they care very much.
So we can and should do better than the bare minimum, and better than 'what users ask for' before they get bitten.
That you do not care is a different story altogether, but consider that if you align your users' interests with your own that you probably stand a much better chance of success than if you do not.
Sure, 'greed is good' and all that but in the end, company data being sold in bankruptcy proceedings is simply bad, companies giving several days warning before shutting down (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770257) are not helping anybody (not even themselves), and Yahoo!'s shutting down Geocities still reverberates around the web (especially the way they went about it, for a pittance they could have continued to at least store the data).
My inbox fills up daily with people that thought they had an agreement with one of the largest companies on the web and it turned out they got hurt badly.
Big or small, it does not matter.
We are all operating by the grace of our users and those people that put their own interests ahead of those of the users are hurting all of us.
Maintaining this sort of integrity is not a cost, it is a long term benefit, for everyone.
When you use words like "code of conduct" and "this sort of integrity" assumptively, as you have here, you invite criticism for an idea that would otherwise be almost so universally accepted as to be anodyne.
On just a second reading, I see the following issues:
* 1.3.2 ("edit" information) will be construed as a mandate that information never be archived (it needs to be "live" to be edited). This is for instance an issue with Twitter, which does not make it easy to find (let alone edit) Tweets from last year.
* 1.6 (least information required) precludes business models that exchange lowered (or no) fees in exchange for user data.
* 2.2.1 puts, in a "startup code of ethics", legal roadblocks to selling companies (do you or I know what is or isn't legally reasonable to promise in something like this? In lots of cases, a lawsuit can easily kill a deal.
* 2.3 puts obligations on a hypothetical third party company to run an extra service
* 2.3.1 requires a six month shutdown notice, by which standard half the companies announced on HN would potentially be required to notify their users at launch.
* 2.3.2 requires, for no apparent reason, startups to open source their software at wind-down --- never mind the fact that most funded startups can't do that, since they don't own the code.
* 2.3.4 says, direct quote: "If our shutdown is involuntarily (for instance, because of bankruptcy) the bankruptcy trustee will be bound by these terms"
Actually here I just stopped reading.
If a startup launched with this in their promise to user signups, I'd laud them. But the person who tries to bind other startups to these ideas under the aegis of "this is what integrity means" probably deserves some flak.
Think of it as a starting point, a first rough version of what I think should be present in a code that binds start-ups to their users to balance the scales and to make sure that people that run companies realize that they have rights, but so do their users.
As for 'eating your own dogfood', I fully intend to subscribe all the services I run to the code of ethics, and I have absolutely no problem with that limiting my options.
And if your views on integrity do not coincide with mine that's perfectly ok, but it is really easy to hammer any idea into the ground, let's see your alternative, something that you think would be an improvement over the status quo that you would find acceptable.
Jacquesm: Just to illustrate how you have a tendency to Specify unreasonable upfront restrictions, your own code prohibits you from correcting some of these errors in your code. Even though this is an 0.1 version, it requires all future versions to be equally or more restrictive. So you will have to live with your "first rough version" forever.
That is exactly as stupid as promising to keep the 0.1 version of your api active forever no matter what even if a serious security vulnerability is discovered.
I think that an update of the first rough version before it is adopted for practical reasons is perfectly ok, but once adopted it should not be possible to water it down by adopting later versions. That opens the door to adopting a version without restrictions at all and that would render the whole thing pointless.
Keeping your API active if there are security vulnerabilities is interpreting the thing to the letter, the idea is that you will fix the vulnerability and that you will continue to provide the functionality at the same time. If there is an unreasonable conflict between the two (and I fail to see how that could be possible except for very contrived cases) then there probably will be a way to resolve that conflict to everybody's satisfaction.
I very much like RDL's idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774133 , it solves some of the problems without introducing any new ones.
And it allows for a partial adoption, which is really neat.
When you write things like "bankruptcy trustee will be bound by these terms", it becomes hard to argue that other people are unfairly interpreting it "to the letter".
Still waiting for your alternative.
As for the bankruptcy situation, that's one of those cases where there is absolutely no loss for the start-up, after all, the people that found the start-up have nothing to gain once they go bankrupt, but users have everything to gain because if their data gets sold the buyer will be able to do just about anything he wants with the data if the conditions have not been created ahead of time in such a way that they survive the transition.
So, from the point of view of the start-up owner and the users that's a win-win, it may reduce the value of the assets during a bankruptcy liquidation but that's an acceptable trade-off in my opinion.
The issue with your bankruptcy clause isn't its reasonableness (although I personally don't think it's reasonable); the issue is that it's probably not enforceable. I'm not particularly interested in amateurishly delving into the nature of executory and non-executory contracts between freemium startups and their users, but just know that this is not a simple niche in US law.
I'm a very arrogant guy (really), but not so much that I feel like I can come up with a code of conduct for startups on my own. I've got no alternative to offer you. I don't think we need one and I'd bet the market is going to agree.