When We Get Komooted

I'm gonna copy paste a comment I wrote yesterday that I think fits perfectly here:

As an engineer if you are gonna be a rank and file employee you need to do it for your own reasons. I think the main good reasons to do it are:

1. It's relatively chill and you value the stability. You deliver competence from 9-5 then go home to your family or some other thing that's more important to you than work.

2. You really enjoy the pure engineering side and find meaning in the technical artifact you're creating. Probably it's open source and has some value/community outside of your employer.

3. You're gaining valuable experience that you can later leverage into something else. Probably you're in the first 5 years of your career.

If the main thing driving you is growing a business, and you don't directly own (not options or RSUs or whatever, actual real equity) a significant slice of it, you are very likely misdirecting your energy.

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It sounds like the staff here thought they were in case 2, but they were not. I think that the article explains the reason why nicely: the thing they were building was not part of the commons.

There is nothing unethical about: you are doing the only sane thing in this system and economics. Morons, who work themselves to death believing bosses shit-talk about “our mission” and “we are in this together” will learn it the hard way.

The article mentions one example: https://wanderer.to/. Haven't used it personally but seems promising (albeit less "social" than something like Strava).

Friend of mine wrote this app[0]. It’s iOS-only (I’m not the target demographic, myself, but he works for a company that serves bikers, and is very much a fitness chap). It’s quite mature, and well-maintained. Personally, I know him as an outstanding engineer, so I’m sure it’s well-written. It’s been a labor of love for him, for over a decade.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/app/id605127860

I am quite happy with Wikiloc app. Feature wise it is not that different from Komoot and the yearly subscription which allows me to use it on my watch was only 20 EUR.

Recommend any alternatives?

It makes sense if you realize that there's no certainty a sale will go through and you don't want to pause all operations with the blind hope that a sale will happen

Having said that, if someone just joined before the sale and is laid off, they should get a generous layoff package similar to longer term employees since they may have just quit a job to go there and are now back on the market.

Why is that insane? A job this week is no guarantee, legally or practically, of a job next week.

To assume otherwise is foolish and naive. That’s simply not how employment works.

I am the same. I use osmand and sync the recorded tracks with syncthing to my desktop. Works for me but not comparable to sites like komoote of course.

bikepacking.com doesn't look like it's a for-profit company, in their about page.

Honestly it can be quite difficult, generally speaking the best you can do is release the data in raw machine readable format with a permissive license.

Unless you already have large interested parties "bribing" (not technically of course) the group of controlling members tends to be a weakness of anything crowd sourced.

Especially since it is rarely cut and dry. If the finances aren't working out is it better to sell and keep the site online or not? Are intrusive pop ups begging for donations a better option? There isn't a singular true best option.

HN Search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I don't think enough people know about them and their profit-squeezing strategies.

From the article:

> I’ll argue that Komoot is neither a moral failure nor an outlier but the capitalist system of value extraction working exactly as intended for the platform owners.

If it wasn't for Bending Spoons it would have been another private equity firm. It's not about them being particularly evil, it's about living in a system that makes their existence inevitable.

There is openstreetmaps of course and osmand as a navigation app. There is also a biking specific project related to openstreetmaps. None of it is as polished as komoot of course. Far from it. This sell-out was totally predictable. Why the outrage? Do people never learn? It's so frustrating.

I’ve been using https://cycle.travel for a similar purpose. I may not be quite as polished, but it does its job, and it’s developed by a person from the OpenStreetMap community.