BetterGA Is Dead (R.I.P)

As some of you may know, I developed a Firefox extension called BetterGA in 2008. Well today I have to tell you that the project is dead, and may it rest in peace.

I have many reasons to stop working on it, which I don't mind sharing, some are obvious like how much time it takes and what little reward it provides now, others are not as obvious.

Before I started working on BetterGA, I was working at VKI Studios and while I spent very little time on Google Analytics myself the company was very involved, and so I would typically help with JavaScript related questions which came up around GA, and ended up spending a great deal of my free time learning GA's technical side as a result. Eventually, John Hossack noticed other Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs) creating Google Analytics related userscripts and started bouncing some ideas off of me, until the basic idea for Cleaner Profile Switcher was spawned. So I spent about 4-8 hrs at the office working on it, and an equal amount of time at home. Later I thought up the Social Media Metrics userscript for GA, built it mostly on my own time, and spent maybe 3hrs at work getting the blog post ready. Why did I spend so much time at home working on these? well I enjoy the work, and thought I would be properly rewarded should I continue such efforts, with time.

After I had created the two userscripts I mention above, I started thinking about how many GA userscripts there were, also a video I happened to see of Gina Trapani talking about her experience making the Better GMail extension was floating around in my memory, and I had a desire to work on Firefox extensions. These three things led me to start working on BetterGA I think. I did all of the work for BetterGA at home.

Here is were the trouble begins, if we rewind for a moment to when I started working for VKI Studios, little more than a year before working on BetterGA. I was looking pretty hard for work in Vancouver, not finding much at all, and when VKI offered me a job, I was very happy to get it, but then they laid a contract on me to sign which was obviously unfair with items like:

• We can fire you at any time for any reason, and you must give us 60 days notice before quitting.
• We do not pay you any over time, but own everything you do at work and in your free time.
• You may not compete with us for 12 months after leaving.

David Eckman who interviewed me seemed nice enough at the time, so while I knew the contract was a piece of crap, I needed work, so I signed it and tried to do my best work for them. Now fast forward back to when I start working on BetterGA. I knew on the one hand that the code was open source, because it is really a fork of Gina's work which is a fork of another project, so VKI Studios couldn't really control the source code. I had mentioned BetterGA at VKI Studios while I was working on it stupidly, so David and John knew about it and had already assumed by their wicked nature that they owned it. I could see then that an issue had arose between VKI and myself was over who would release the code. If VKI released the code I would get some credit, but VKI would also have some, which they didn't deserve imo. If I released the code on my blog though David and John would be upset with me, because they had already started planning the release in their minds. So, I decided to chat with David about the contract, see if I could have some things changed, like owning the code I work on in my free time. This didn't go well as you can imagine, he was pretty upset when I said I thought BetterGA was mine and I shouldn't have to hand it over to VKI, he thought he owned the code, quite vigorously in fact. So I figured BetterGA wasn't something to risk my job over and let VKI release it, even spent a day of work time preparing the blog post and landing page.

Well, I've quit VKI months ago and setup a separate landing page for BetterGA, but VKI continues to copy my work, and other people continue to link to their landing page. I had started thinking about forking the project and renaming it, to SuperbGA, and actually built a couple versions, but today when I think about maintaining a project like this bitter emotions stir up in me, and besides that it seems like a waste of time. Better Google * projects only help people that are avoiding learning Greasemonkey which is something I would like to encourage they do.