As others have said, management (in my experience) never has the full picture, it has its own perspective.
I'm curious about the breach of trust you feel -- surely investors in a company don't relinquish their values or place unconditional trust in the company? The Kapors are not a PE firm, and their ethical stands have been known for decades.
You can't on the one hand benefit from the brand value of investors like Mitch & Freida and not also expect such stakeholders to also expect a certain caliber of behavior by the company.
I think investors in a startup are forgiving of early missteps. Uber is way, way past that stage.
Out of curiosity, have you looked at Mozilla's Pontoon and if yes, can you compare/contrast the goals of Parrot w/ those of Pontoon? https://github.com/mozilla/pontoon
To be honest I didn't know about pontoon before, which is surprising given that, like Parrot, it's a localization tool and by Mozilla. I guess I should do more research before starting a new project :)
But after checking it out quickly, it seems to me that its main focus is in-place translation for web projects (I could be wrong).
Parrot is mainly a tool to help you manage your translations for various projects, no specific platform is targeted. It comes with a REST API (useful for loading translation updates for mobile apps/games for example) and role based contributions. It's meant for small/medium multidisciplinary teams, so no features for crowd-sourced translations are provided.
Basically it was built out of the need for such a tool at my current company (gaming industry, multi-platform projects). We wanted it on premises, open-source and a web-UI for editing so that people from different disciplines can use it.
It's on-premises, open source, has a web UI, supports many formats and comes with a REST API. I'm sure you must have seen it - any reason you didn't go that route?
Aside: I see you're shipping with nginx and have a whole ssl setup. Take a look at Caddy, your life may get simpler :) https://caddyserver.com/
Is (or: in what way is) Parrot comparable to Smartling, https://www.smartling.com/, a commercial SaaS offering for localizations/translations of all kinds of content?
At my current project, we're integrating with Smartling for both content in a CMS as for web application internationalization (including translation, localization). Smartling provides a nice (and well-documented) API as well to submit, retrieve and manage translation projects... and a number of 'connectors' for some big CMS applications for synchronizing content and translations hence and forth. Your project looks like a worthy competitor (while being self-hosted)... nice job!
Parrot is more of a tool for managing your translations and distributing them (via REST API), while being self-hosted and open-source. I haven't looked at Smartling in depth, but seems cool! After reading a bit about it, one feature that differentiates it would be the "Marketplace of professional translators", Parrot does not intend to go in that direction :)
I used to find such comments funny until I began working for Big Name Corps myself and I realized how much one's personal philosophy could be inconsistent or sometimes even contradictory to the employer's philosophy. I make money by selling my skills to an employer despite inconsistent philosophies. I think it's like a chef that can cook meat for his/her guests although the chef has decided to refrain from consuming meat himself/herself.
This was done in partnership with the Internet Archive folks -- they _want_ the traffic, in part because this helps people know about the Archive, but mostly because this is a public benefit feature, which is what non-profits strive to provide.
As to the amount of traffic it generates, that's one reason why we're doing this through Test Pilot -- we can dial that up or down.
Good questions. At this point, we're trying to identify user value with prototypes. We're a long way away from defining things like the software update model on as-yet-unspecified devices.
