Hi @dabigkahuna,

I only got partway through @dpwhittaker’s write up before I felt sick. Because what was written was not done with good intent. I deduce several possible intents, none of which were good. I will explain why I came to those conclusions, but first of all, for there to be civil discourse, there must be truth. Truth is merely that which cannot hurt us.

The truth may not be pleasant, and may be hard to swallow, but is meant to help, not hurt. An example of an inconvenient truth in my own life: I eat too much and that is making me fat, no amount of cycling to work will fix that. I have to start at the source: what I eat, and how much I eat. If I accept this truth and make the appropriate changes, my health and my self-image will improve.

So here is my BS detector laid out. I understand that publicly posting this risks offending @dpwhittaker and anyone who agrees with such comments, but let’s get to the truth.

I think the real question is not whether WayTools has a “product” or not, because “product” isn’t much more descriptive than “thing” and can mean just about anything these days.

Play on words. Pointless. Meant to incite anger.

The real questions are: Will WayTools go bankrupt and not even be able to refund people’s money before they actually ship the TextBlade and start recouping their losses? If not, will it take them so long to do it that some competitor builds something similar that obsoletes the TextBlade before it is ever released?

They refunded @dpwhittaker’s money.

This isn’t WayTool’s first rodeo. Their NextEngine 3D scanner, which I used over a dozen years ago, is still unparalleled. The keyboard market is much larger, and a good product will mean that they can recoup the investment.

The process of developing something good (from what I read on folklore.org, and from books, and in small ways, my experience) doesn’t leave much room for this kind of BS. It’s one thing for SJ himself to say something is rubbish (because he feels it needs to be redone, and it could be much better, and then actively engages to make it better, and learns that he didn’t express himself well) but it is another thing for someone to dump on your work without any form of actual mentorship and guidance.

It would be dangerous to say something couldn’t be copied, and I wish people wouldn’t do shameless ripoffs, but even after the Mac software was copied, Apple still had, in their darkest years, more than 2% of market which I think was $4bn annual revenue.

Maybe WayTools has no Full Time employees and pays the people that build it next to nothing to build it in their spare time. That might explain why it has taken 4 years to build a keyboard, and it would mean they could last almost indefinitely on the preorders they’ve already received or just the personal sacrifice of the founder.

Personal attacks, no matter how cleverly disguised, reek from a mile away.

Or maybe they only have one Jack-of-all-trades mechanical engineer that has picked up enough programming skills to be able to write his own embedded software. That might explain why it’s taken over six months to refactor firmware which has a hard upper limit on its code size.

Another personal attack. Two in a row increases the threshold for my BS detector for “founded in hatred” but even if not, the statements are certainly grounded in falsehood. Whether it was ignorance or intentional gas-lighting is to be determined. No objectively senior software developer would say something like that about refactor and code size.

I doubt it though, which means that unless the founder is personally wealthy or funded by magical unicorn angel investors …

Statements like “magical unicorn” make it hard for me to continue. Ever run into a person who likes the sound of their own voice? I’m guilty of that big time, so it causes me to burn in shame when I see someone else do it - it reminds me of my own dark nature. @dpwhittaker, I sound like the kettle calling the pot black - can we BOTH stop writing like this? It helps no one, and not ourselves.

I stopped reading, because numbers are meant to measure, quantify, analyze, infer, and predict. But you can’t do that with his numbers.

There are bad actors. People who try to steal your code, or suss out how your business operates. As much as I believe in openness, I don’t believe that we can allow all such details to be fully open.

No offence to the open source software people (I am, at heart, open source too, you’ll find my small contributions on GitHub and StackOverflow), but it is one thing to Invent (Unix: millions of dollars, BitKeeper) and another thing to Clone (Linux, Git & Mercurial), even if later on due to community contributions the clone takes on a life of its own.

While I hope very much that one day, we’ll be like in Star Trek - everybody fed and educated, a just society with no racism/inequality/violence, and able to pursue excellence, and everything open source, I wouldn’t hold my breath for that to happen. Humanity still has to get rid of greed first.

Until we get rid of greed (and all greed/power related activities like espionage), WayTools will regretfully have to keep their BS detectors on alert, and not respond to any public conjectures on how their business is operated, with actual numbers.