Once upon a time, I had a bit of a problem involving feed blending. I thought that I had found a solution by using Yahoo Pipes, and it got the job done, but something always bugged me, which was the appearance of wrong characters in the pipe output. I eventually narrowed the problem down to trouble with Unicode, but after a day’s worth of wracking my brain I decided that it was all sunk cost, and just built my own functionality with Google App Engine.
Life was good, for all of 5 or so hours. I announced my app to the community and was subsequently politely asked by the owner of one of the feeds to shut down my app until things were “talked over.”
Now there’s something to be said about forgiveness over permission. I think that I wouldn’t have been permitted to build my little hobby project in the first place, and I don’t regret having done it. In light of me still waiting to “talk things over” over 24 hours after the fact when it only took 5 to send a cease and desist request, I regret it even less. It seems increasingly apparent that the probability of the app ever launching again is absolutely nil and here’s why:
Party 1: “You can’t launch until we’ve sat down and talked things over.”
Party 2: “Alright, let’s talk.”
Party 1 sticks ear plugs in their ears, the kind that grounds crew personnel wear on airport runways.
Party 1: “What? I can’t hear you, and if I can’t hear you, then we’re not talking.”
I acknowledge that it is well within the owner’s rights to compel me to never deploy the app again, but to do it in this way is simply negotiating in bad faith.
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