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Ask HN: What Happened to the Segment.com Open-Source Fellowships?

37 points by _Marak_ ↗ HN
Does anyone know what happened to the Segment.com open-source fellowships?

They were offering 3-5 positions over the summer paying $8,000 a month to fund open-source projects.

https://open.segment.com/fellowship

https://segment.com/blog/segment-open-fellowship-2017

I had applied with one of my projects, but never got any response. Based on their blog, it appears that no open-source fellowships were ever awarded to anyone.

What is really bothering me about all this, is that I've now learned they will be soon be releasing a commercial product that is strongly related to the open-source project I submitted. At the time of submission, I gave them a lot of information about my project's design and future plans, which I believe they used to help develop their own commercial product.

I think that Segment needs to be socially responsible and actually deliver the promise they committed to. If they are going to use their "open-source fellowship" as a source of research and development, they should at least award SOMEONE the funds who is working on open-source.

10 comments

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hitekker
What was the project that you submitted? And, for comparison, what is the commercial product Segment will be releasing?

I hope someone from Segment responds to your concerns.

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jaequery
sounds to me like you shouldnt be open sourcing your project if you are thinking like that.
amingilani
OP is understandably frustrated since he believes a commercial project was created using ideas from his plans.

Not all open source software is permissive licensed (e.g. MIT). I personally attach copyleft licenses (e.g. GPL) to my open source works because if someone really needs to include my code in their proprietary software, they should be willing to pay me for a permissive license.

jaequery
well, i understand the frustration, but what are the alternatives? i don't think there is anything Segment could've done otherwise. because, should Segment be publicly addressing to everyone of all their internal projects? how would we know which projects weren't already in development?

and if expecting some NDA for an 'open source' project, that is just wishful thinking.

btw, i too have submitted my app to them, knowing full well in advance that they would have every power to just take my ideas to do what they want to do with it. i did get a response email from them i think roughly 6 weeks ago, so that is something.

but i'll say this. the idea and vision of the fellowship was grand and bold (something i wish more companies would do) but it was a bit disappointing to see it beeing poorly executed at the end.

giis
> I've now learned they will be soon be releasing a commercial product that is strongly related to the open-source project I submitted.

Is it someone from segment informed you about this upcoming commercial product? How did you learned about this info? What if there is no such plans or upcoming product?

Are you sure about their terms & conditions? Some companies include special clause to own or implement these ideas on their own.

I hope someone from segment will address your concerns.

fouadmatin
Hi Marak! I’m Fouad and I work at Segment, specifically on this program.

To provide a bit of additional context, we launched the program on March 23rd (which closed on May 8th), received 285 applications, and then selected four of them as fellows on June 20th. We notified everyone that had applied that day.

From there, we still had to coordinate the final logistics with the fellows who were selected. A few were at full-time jobs and needed time to coordinate long-term sabbaticals, so we’ve had to delay the announcement on the selection process.

As far as why you weren’t contacted, this is totally my fault and an honest mistake. Even though the deadline was May 8th, we still had an ‘apply late’ form that was able to submit applications for late participants. However, nobody was monitoring the form after June 20th since we’d already accepted the fellows and were still figuring out the logistics with them. I just checked your application and it came in on June 21st.

I’m really sorry about that, we’ll do better here next time–I honestly feel terrible for botching the logistics, and can totally understand the frustration. For what it’s worth, nobody had seen your application until now, and I removed the application form earlier today to ensure this mistake doesn’t happen again.

Happy to answer other questions here or at open@segment.com, we’ll be announcing the four fellows in September.

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shubhamjain
Slightly related to this is a Stephen King's FAQ Question [1].

> Will you read my manuscript and tell me what you think?

.... "There's another reason, and that's a legal one. I've been sued for plagiarism 8 or 9 times. Any writer who has deep pockets has been sued for plagiarism from time-to-time-that goes for J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, really everyone. For everyone who publishes best-selling fiction, somebody wants to think, 'Oh, he got that idea from me' and so it's just much easier and much safer to say I never read that book at all".

I mean, out of hundreds of applications that they received, one idea slightly matching with what they were already doing is highly probable. It seems rather unlikely that a company leader would see an application and jump out of his seat to instruct his team to copy the idea without any credit.

[1]: http://stephenking.com/faq.html

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