I would definitely participate as a contributer, if it's open-source. I'll email you.
By the way, I have already tried Meteor which relies on MongoDB. However, Firebase allows you to read and write data at any arbitrary location. MongoDB, on the contrary, expects you to have some basic "collections" and write complete documents in there. Anything that is on a deeper level inside is called "embedded document" and the support for common operations is much worse.
Well, it is. Just like Meteor. There are dozens of possibilities how you could do it nowadays. You can even use your own Node.js server with WebSockets, use CouchDB, etc.
But nothing comes close to the first experience and ease of development you have with Firebase. And I'd love to build my products around Firebase and embrace their service if there was not that risk of them shutting down some day.
An API that works as a drop-in replacement would let us developers sleep much better, wouldn't it?
So I'd like to know: Which open-source product would you consider best as the foundation for something like that?
Couchbase? hood.ie? Meteor? CouchDB?
I'd love to work on such an open-source "clone", and maybe we'll even find some more collaborators.
Can you explain why you would suggest CouchDB? Of course, it seems to be a great project. Nevertheless, it has no built-in support for publishing and subscribing, and real-time notifications.
We would have to built this ourselves. However, CouchDB has a "_changes" API that can even be turned into "continuous" mode [1]. This is the perfect data source for pub/sub.
hood.ie, Meteor, etc. offer more features, but they are also more cluttered and not as clean as CouchDB.
Well I mean if you just want to use replace Firebase you might as well use hood.ie directly, unless you want to build it yourself (in which case using just the database and layering functionality on top of that might be best). Hood.ie can be an out-of-the-box replacement for most of Firebase's functionality as it is.
Well, skobbler did all this for iOS and Android. And TeleNav bought skobbler for $24M in January [1] -- so it's obvious why TeleNav might be able to do this now.
But will skobbler support stop? Why switch from skobbler to TeleNav's own products at all? With skobbler, you can get your whole continent's maps for roughly $7.50.
You can still count clicks without associating it with the user who clicked. Anyway, the "doesn't track you" part is the whole point of DDG. If you don't like/need that, you can simply use Google.
The question remains whether we (or rather you, the Chrome team) should leave such a decision to some "metrics". What has happened to smart decisions, bold moves and instinct?
Apple has all the resources, and they had the "goto fail". You should not underrate open source. Bugs are shallow, but that can never mean every single bug. Some bugs will always be overlooked, no matter if open source or closed source.
There are new tools[1] being built around Docker that make it viable to easily move your apps out of Heroku and onto any system running Docker including DigitalOcean, GCE, AWS, etc.
When you combine Docker, buildpacks, and CoreOS[2], you get a scalable and flexible platform that you can run anywhere. It has taken people a long time to combine the simplicity of Heroku with the flexibility of bare metal, but the open source guys have finally put all the building blocks together.
Another tool that does just this would be Deis[1]. We specifically combine CoreOS (in heavy development[2]), Docker, Heroku Buildpacks, and also Dockerfile deployments[3], too!
I would definitely participate as a contributer, if it's open-source. I'll email you.
By the way, I have already tried Meteor which relies on MongoDB. However, Firebase allows you to read and write data at any arbitrary location. MongoDB, on the contrary, expects you to have some basic "collections" and write complete documents in there. Anything that is on a deeper level inside is called "embedded document" and the support for common operations is much worse.