> CEO of JETNET ( Greg Fell, now fired from JETNET by Silversmith) called and asked for a meeting. We thought was sales call. Turns out he offered to buy ADSBx from Dan for $8M, they wined dined and toured him around. Flew him to Boston, Dan cut us out when we ALL OBJECTED to a sale.
We think they gave him $20M ish and a $200 a year job at JETNET. They'll fire him in a year, that's what PE does.
Perhaps it's legal but it's not ethical for a founder to sell something that's provided by thousands of volunteers (I'm sure a lot of the code was as well as the data)
Usually I'd agree completely, but in this case I'm not sure I mind. Happy to be wrong, but as I see it there's three things of value in ADSBx. The brand/reputation, the server/feeder software and the amount of real time data provided by the community. Without the latter the brand becomes worthless, and the software in the middle is predominantly open source software.
£20M for the name in the knowledge that the software isn't secret, the infrastructure isn't that complicated and that the community will rebrand and be back up with a couple of months of disruption (ala freenode->liberachat) seems like guilt free retirement money in the bank. You could even make an anonymous donation to whoever takes the place.
The value comes from the current data, and the data is reliant on the community which is something you can't purchase. Most people liked ADSBx because it supported MLAT and was happy to report aircraft that from that data that usually wouldn't show on pf, fr24 and most others. If that functionality is removed then the community would likely die away naturally anyway.
Because if the historical data isn't all that valuable, I feel like Jetnet bought a turd. Building and operating a service like ADS-B Exchange doesn't sound particularly technically challenging or expensive.
Building a community of people who send you data for free is the hard and time-consuming part; IMO that's where ADSBx's value is. Did Jetnet not anticipate that the acquisition would likely drive away a good number of those people? Seems pretty naive if they didn't.
It seems like a really weird PE acquisition to me. Did they have iron-clad, shockingly lucrative data distribution contracts? The site still has a donate button on it as of this moment, and somewhere says something along the lines of “in the very unlikely event our revenues ever exceed our opex, all excess will be reinvested in the project.”
One of the technical leads on the project said the site was generating between $500-3000 a day in revenue. It wasn’t clear if that was just ad revenue (which is a cash flow PE is definitely NOT buying) or ads + data subscriptions, but I just can’t imagine they bought much of substance here, when it sounds like the entire technical team has moved on. If the feeder network declines, what’s left? Stale flight data?
Also questionable that they were even selling this content provided by volunteers to begin with. I'm personally excited for the future and hoping for more honest and open practices in this space.
For the Freenode -> Libera.Chat move the operators seem to have learned this lesson and set up a nonprofit with shared governance to prevent a takeover/sellout by a single person. Perhaps the community that will move out after this takeover will be smart enough to do the same.
Like decentralization? That's the main reason I am now on the Fediverse (via Elk + self hosting), because a billionaire cannot just scoop it up and change the rules of the game.
Yeah, unless I was still unreasonably passionate about running an open and free service like that, I'd be hard-pressed to turn down that offer.
I'd feel bad about it, definitely, as I do agree it'd be a slap in the face to the community, and I'd know that I'd probably never get people to trust me in the role of running that sort of a service again. Not to mention burning bridges with the community members who helped run the service.
But $20M? I'm lucky that I've already built up a nice nest egg through the whole FIRE thing, but $20M (even after taxes) would take me from "can live a pretty comfortable life without working as long as I watch my finances" to "can live an amazing life without working, and will never have to worry about money ever again".
I'm not sure what terms ADS-B Exchange licensed out the collected data, but maybe it's even possible for someone to build a new service, and keep the historical data intact. Even if not, it seems like there is at least one other community-run service for people who are upset by this to switch to. And frankly this doesn't seem like a particularly difficult or expensive service to build or maintain.
Is it normal for a company like that to more than double their initial offer? I know 20m is probably pocket change to them, but it still seems like they were rather desperate to buy it.
Not sure how it matches feature for feature, but https://opensky-network.org has been crowdsourcing unfiltered ADSB data for longer, provides tools to view the data and supplies full API access to the raw data to academics and non-profits at no charge.
There's room for another provider, and at the same time lots of enthusiasts with the boxes will carry on sending it, like they do to other closed source, profit-making ventures like FlightAware and Flightradar24...
If you go to https://github.com/airframesio/ , it talks about how they want to eventually open source stuff, but mercy, like 90% of their stuff is private right now.
I would absolutely not go to airframes.io in it's current state.
Note that at the moment aiframes is for a completely different type of aviation-produced data (messages: acars, hfdl, vdl, ...). I am assuming that airframes.io will create an ADS-B feed too, now that the best open system (adsbexchange) is gone.
