Conversation

OK, now Beaker browser received its in-between-years "it was an incredible journey" summary, by the main engineer:

https://beakerbrowser.com/

I used to be pretty invested in dat and Beaker browser, also diligently executed the transition to the hyper protocol, made UI suggestions, helped to structure some projects to use Beaker. The browser not being maintained anymore and becoming dysfunctional was not nice, but this "post mortem" is adding insult to injury.

Again, a personal development story of a single, clearly highly gifted engineer who in hindsight thinks it would have been better to follow more closely the advice from investors. Users are described as a number that failed to go up fast enough. None of the users that were lured into putting their stuff into Beaker received thanks, instead gratitude goes out to fellow engineers, financiers, and donors.

Of course this shows how donations can go to waste in absence of a reasonable governance structure. But do engineers understand that while they gain so much from their failed projects—livelihood, knowledge, experience, contacts, etc—all that users are left with are dead links where their stuff used to be?

This exploitative way of creating software used to be only available to commercial entities with lots of financial backing. P2P opens it up for everyone.