Hey Ian

We don't know each other and I wasn't aware you were interested. I don't think you've reached out to me before.

It sounds like you have a very negative impression of me and my work, and I'm sure it seems like a lot of people have that.

I'm sorry for getting the Gumroad capitalization wrong: I've changed that Gumroad to the correct one.

I think it's understandable that people can get confused so let's bring some clarity to that. I'll deal with the linked comments first? But I'll add more in edits

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490389

- The difficulty in ELI5: It is hard, because it's like "What can you build with a browser you can embed". Sort of like anything. From your days in YC, you may be connected to another recent YC company also offering embeddable multiplayer browsers. The possibilities are endless. See my other comments in this thread for ideas.

- The belief that BrowserBox is a rip off of ViewFinderJS ( I assume that's what "to MuleSoft" something means). Actually, ViewFinderJS was a name I gave the project at one point in the past, because it's like a viewfinder, and I like photography. But I thought the name wasn't as clear as something else. So I basically just changed the name whenever I came up with a better one. Kind of like "open creative process" or "showing my work". Just change to the better name whenever I had one. Some other names in the past were: Zanj, BrowserGap. You can think of CloudTabs as an application of the BrowserBox technology! I understand the succession of names can be confusing but I Just wanted to arrive at the best one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495911

- That is quite a lot of research. Someone really spent some time looking into all the licenses of the past. I was surprised why they didn't just email me: suddenly this research appears on my thread from someone I've never heard from before. Again, it's like the names: I just changed it when I thought I could have a better license. I felt ripped off by open source licenses, and people's sense of entitlement. I felt I'd been duped into using OSS licenses, but people didn't care about me or my work, they just wanted something for themselves. I didn't understand licenses at first. And then I started to get a picture, still within the "dogma" of OSS, and I thought AGPL. But in the end I just realized OSS is not a good fit for something which is a comprehensive product like BrowserBox is (better fit for a component). And at different points I'd read something and think, "Oh, that's the good license" and kind of get excited about it and put it in there, and then change it later. More just like an artistic process. Repainting / reworking. Maybe you can say it's not ideal from a license point of view, but...like, I don't really care. We put in a lot of work on this. And I want to capture the rewards of that. OSS licenses were getting in the way here, so they had to go. But I went through a process of thinking maybe there was a better option in OSS, but turns out there wasn't. I imagine some people are pissed off that they can't get that tech for free. I thought people would pay even if it was OSS, but people are not like that. I'm not worried about the earlier work: it's just like a contribution to the community. We put in so much work since then, people can't take that. At the end of the day, if people want to license our technology, they can just deal with us transparently, in the open, and pay. If it's so valuable, of course they will. And if you're an individual or non-profit, there's the non-commercial option.

What else was there?

> I think finding an elegant (and not shady) way of providing clear, transparent answers to these questions would go a long way towards your journey, and I think it's important to notice recurring themes in people's reactions, and consider what's amiss, and what it'd take for your product to be more likeable.

Sounds as if you've seen something shady, inelegant, nontransparent, amiss or unlikeable in your observation of me and my work and you think it recurs?

I suppose the idea of a browser does rouse people’s suspicions about privacy. A browser is a personal garment you wear very close to your skin. It is unusual to outsource that to anyone. Completely understandable concern.

And however people come to the idea of shady, amiss, unlikeable, untransparent, I guess it’s possible for them to form those opinions. The confusion over what the project is, over all the licenses, even the name. The feeling of betrayed expectations when we changed the licenses. It’s natural that people will get confused, even angry, and it's understandable. And I suppose it’s inevitable that some people will form really negative opinions, out of a cautious suspicion, and maybe even anger that they feel they can't get something for free now, and so on. It’s understandable. It's unfortunate, but I mean, it's not a straight line.

This is hard work to make something like this. And it's not easy to make the process itself look so neat, especially when you work in the open, and all your decisions and revisions of your perspective are there in the record. It's not a straight line.

What can I say? I'm not perfect. But I don't pretend to be. It's a work in progress. Is that so hard to accept? I get if you want to read something bad into all this. Maybe you've got something against me. Maybe you're friends with people who feel angry it's not free anymore. I don't know. So I get if you want to read something bad into all this, from your own mind. But that's not about me. Where do you draw the line? Reality and perception, how are you so sure?

I know you started with some compliments and questions about my reasons for working on this so let's end there: I think in the future every browser will be streaming. There's a trend towards fatter servers that AI is just 1 part of. Bandwidth only gets better, and experiences will evolve ever richer, with VR. Interactive video will become normal, and this browser is like the first interactive "streaming video" application that's not a game, and not just a blackbox desktop portal.

I also think that by taking this "impermeable" ubiquitous tool, and opening it up through programmability and virtualization into something you can customize and build anything atop of, you open up so many new experiences. My main reason to build this at the start was I was doing web scraping projects for a client, and I wanted a better way to reduce repetitive work. So I started dreaming of what the best version of that tool would look like: and it wouldn't be a chrome extension, or a downloadable app. It would just work in the browser, without a download. But iframe's couldn't do it, and Chrome packaged apps (with their Webview) tag were going away (and never I think on mobile anyway). So slowly this idea evolved. At some point I realized (around the time of the Gartner report), that a "remote browser" was a product layer in its own right. So, since that time I've been working to perfect that layer, both as its own layer, and as a foundation for future work. Necessarily, I've gotten into cybersecurity, which necessitates a focus on security and privacy.

Thank you for this opportunity to shine some light in dark places and flush out some cobwebs! Hahaha :)