I spent a while mixing this up with PiKVM and was having trouble understanding how any of it would fit in with that project. Made a lot more sense once I got over that.
Would the licensing of Grist allow for building widgets/components to use it in dashboard tools like Streamlit, Jupyter, or Holoviz's Panel? Looks cool!
The description of the incident in their quarterly financial statement seems to match this description. It doesn't downplay it quite as much as the email they sent customers.
> For example, in January 2021, we became aware that certain of our information technology systems hosted by a third party cloud provider were improperly accessed and certain of our source code and the credentials used to access the information technology systems themselves had been compromised. We received a threat to publicly release these materials unless we made a payment, which we have not done. As a result, it is possible that the source code and other information could be publicly disclosed or made available to our competitors. Due to the nature of the source code and the other information that we believe was improperly accessed, we at this time do not believe that any public disclosure will have a material adverse effect on our business or operations, but it is impossible to gauge the precise impact of any such disclosure. We have taken, and will continue to take, steps to remediate access controls to our information technology systems.
I'm also reminded of the time Stuart Butterfield explained why he felt compelled to sell shares of Slack at the generous valuations and terms people were offering to him.
> It’s pretty straightforward. I’ve been in this industry for 20 years. This is the best time to raise money ever. It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians. It’s certainly the best time for late-stage start-ups to raise money from venture capitalists since this dynamic has been around.
> And as a board member and a C.E.O., I have a responsibility to our employees, to our customers. And as a fiduciary, I think it would be almost imprudent for me not to accept $160 million bucks for 5-ish percent of the company when it’s offered on favorable terms.
I'm going to start by saying that I pretty much agree with you that it's immoral to knowingly screw people over.
Now with that out of the way, I think there's more of a gray area here than you might think. While there are many situations where people enter into a transaction with the belief that it's a win-win for everybody involved, I think there are legitimate situations where you can trade with people ethically while also believing that the other person is making a huge mistake.
Bitcoin is a pretty great example of this. Suppose I'd been gifted a bitcoin in December of 2017. That was right around the peak of a huge rally for Bitcoin. If I'd sold it to someone for $15k I would have thought that the person buying it from me was an idiot. They may have thought the same of me. As long as we were honest with one another, that seems okay to me.
The situation with Hertz was just kind of weird. It's as though I was taking out the trash one day and someone walked up to me and offered me $1000 for my trash. I don't really have any strong moral intuitions about whether taking their money is okay because it's such a goofy and unexpected thing to do.
I see that it looks like it will be self-hostable and that the repo is forthcoming but I had to scroll a lot to see that.
Looks interesting though!