Meteor launch post-mortem, LICENSING UPDATE

[Summary: Huge launch, caught by surprise. Big license announcement FRIDAY.]

A week ago we posted meteor.com to Hacker News. We thought a few hundred people would see it, maybe a thousand if we were lucky. Then, the theory went, with the veil of secrecy lifted, we could start in on the hard part -- convincing anyone to look at what we were doing, or care.

Five minutes after clicking the submit button, it was already clear that we had miscalculated by three orders of magnitude. No, the dashboard wasn't broken, there were 5,000 simultaneous users on the website. (And the single-process Meteor app running the site was doing fine.) We expected a few dozen deploys but got ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED. Vimeo says that 70,000 people watched the screencast. What fraction of all living JavaScript developers is that?

"Makes me want to build things." "Blew my mind." "Is this the future of web development?" (Yes, Alex, it is.) "I think I just saw the future." "crazy voodoo magic" "dark sorcery" "This is completely bananas." "I am falling in love."

Even as I write this, 100 people are active on docs.meteor.com and a new app is getting deployed every three minutes. 150 people are hanging out in IRC, and people are answering each other's questions on Stack Overflow and Quora. It's like a perpetual, international Meteor hackathon.

It's all happening much faster than we thought. It's going to be a wild ride, and I'm so happy that you've decided to ride with us. We have some hard work to do now, though. We have to turn this excitement and energy into a real community, and we have to implement the rest of the roadmap and ship a 1.0.


** LICENSING UPDATE **

Licensing is the first order of business. Many people sent comments. There were three kinds:

1) People who were frustrated because they wanted to use Meteor for a project, but couldn't tell if it was allowed or how much it would cost.

2) Detailed analyses of legal, strategic, and technological implications of every possible choice we could make. This was AWESOME and was incredibly helpful. Some of the people who wrote in are smarter and better informed than any license attorney I've ever talked to.

3) "You suck, you really screwed this up, you are bad people." These comments weren't as helpful, but we're still glad to have them.

I really apologize to everyone who was frustrated. We thought it was going to be months before anyone was interested enough in Meteor to care about the license. Clearly that was wrong.

Licensing is tricky. We're working hard to fix the problem. ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, we will announce the options for using Meteor in closed-source, commercial software. I think nearly everyone will be happy with the solution. We'll post the announcement on Hacker News, and we'll also send an email to the list. I hope you'll upvote and redistribute as you find appropriate, because even though there are 6,000 people on this list, that's still only 5% of the uniques we've seen on meteor.com.

See you on Friday :)

-- Geoff, Matt, Nick, David
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