Telegraph, Interesource and the future
So Shane has blown the gaff on the situation with My Telegraph and Interesource. I was one of the ‘techies’ he mentions who spent the whole night moving the servers back to Telegraph Towers one Tuesday in December. I eventually got to bed at 7 am. Despite that, the community has been slagging me off, which is nice. I hope they feel suitably chastened now.
Telegraph’s network configuration is very different from the topology at Interesource, and most of our problems were with getting the network configured correctly so that all the boxes could see each other over the right ports. As Shane says, we found some stuff yesterday that was screwing with performance - hopefully things should now be much better.
Shane mentions in passing an exciting project that we’ll be working on - I can say no more except that we’ll try to be as transparent as we can. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a very big announcement next week.
The reaction to Shane’s post has been interesting and I’d heartily endorse One Man and His Blog who identifies the perils of external hosting. To that, I’d add the perils of proprietary software. I spent a long time trying to convince people at Interesource that we should open-source our platform, not just because we could potentially harness the power of the community, but also because it would protect our existing clients and make us more attractive to new ones. Global Beach certainly did not see the advantage of OSS - once the acquisition was complete there was no chance of it being open-sourced.
For the benefit of people negotiating with people to write you software and provide hosting, I strongly advise you to establish an escrow agreement whereby a copy of the latest source code and data is regularly deposited with a trusted third party in case the company goes bust. Make sure that when people write software for you that you have a licence in perpetuity to do whatever you like with the software. Make sure that all the code you need is deposited, even code that was not written for you. You need to plan for an eventuality where the company simply doesn’t exist any more. The licence to use the software is also critical. It’s no use have a copy of the code if you’re not licensed to use it. Naturally, open source software doesn’t come with these drawbacks.
Although Interesource had verbal agreements with customers (I know, because I outlined the agreement myself countless times) that they could have access to the source code at any time and could do whatever they wanted with it, except transfer the licence to another party, the contracts that Interesource produced did not actually include these terms in many cases. Therefore, it’s been very difficult for customers to get access to their code and data - and by difficult I mean expensive, in some cases prohibitively so. Simon Dixon guesses who this might have affected.
I was asked about escrow many times in pitches by prospective clients. I always answered truthfully - that we’d be willing to have an escrow agreement for both code and data. Not one customer took us up on this. So, it’s not good enough just to ask if an agency would be prepared to enter into an escrow deal - you need to make sure it actually happens from day one. If you get agencies during the first month or so, they’ll be falling over themselves to oblige - once the relationship has had a chance to develop, they will have more leverage over you and so may be less willing to do such a deal.
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