End of an Era 2

Sam Hart

2007-05-11 15:05:03

Well, the Progeny closure I mentioned here is starting to get more press, as you can see in this Linux.com article. However, I'd just like to say that a lot of what is in that article is total bullshit. Sorry, but it's true.

I was there at Progeny up until their last few weeks of operations. Additionally, I'm good friends with the former employees, and was able to keep apprised on the situation at Progeny after I left. Hell, I'm even still owed money by Progeny, so you can say that I'm considerably connected to the former company.

Really, the final nail in the coffin for Progeny was the fact that every time we'd get a contract we'd wind up in some powerless state where our customers could walk all over us. Everything from customers demanding months of what was effectively free labor, to customers demanding funds returned because they simply didn't have the resources to evaluate what we built for them.

Additionally, Progeny had a board that had lost interest in them fairly quickly and then never did anything to help. The fact that Progeny was effectively acting without management for the last leg of their existence is proof of that.

You want to do a post-mortem on Progeny and discover what other small FOSS companies can really glean from it, you need only look at the following bullet-list:

• Have strong contracts. Your contracts should be there to protect your interests and prevent your customers from walking all over you. You should never have a contract where you do something stupid like devote two engineers for a month to a project for free as an "evaluation period", or sell a customer twelve custom platforms for the price of one and then throw in a free migration utility that can magically upgrade RH9 installs live, in the field, to a CentOS 4 base.


• Realize your customers need you as much as you need them. This is perhaps the most bitter pill for a small company to swallow, but swallow it they must. You simply can't approach every customer like you're some sort of starving drug addict looking for your next fix. You sometimes have to put your foot down so you don't get fucked in the ass.


• Give your engineers freedom to innovate, but keep a watchful eye on problems, and don't be afraid to give "tough love" to get things on track. One big problem with small FOSS companies is that the engineers are seen as so important that they sometimes can get away with murder. Just because it may be painful to have to replace an employee on such a small team shouldn't mean that you let them put in 2 hours work a day (or less) without repercussions. And if they do start dropping down to less and less effort, you need to really see what's causing this drop. If it's burn-out on a rather difficult project and dealing with a difficult customer, then something needs to be done sooner rather than later to rectify this.

There's likely other points to take from this, but I'm tired of talking about it. I've moved on, and enjoy my current job too much to dwell on the tragedy that is Progeny's last days.

I guess at the end I'll just close by pointing out that the author of that article is someone who has previously worked at Progeny many years ago, and whose words should be taken with a grain of salt. His article seems to have cherry-picked comments made by certain folks to present his own personal ideas of what went wrong with Progeny.