Carl Tyler's Blog :: Why did IBM remove Sandbox?

Category Sandbox Missing
In case you don't know the Lotus Sandbox of sample code that is pointed to by hundreds of Lotus Developer works articles, hundreds of forum responses was removed by IBM.

The Lotus Sandbox was closed to all new submissions in 2007. Downloads of previous submissions were still available as an archived resource following that closure, but effective September 2010, downloads from the Lotus Sandbox are no longer available.

What this means is you could be reading an article like this or this , and you decide hey I want to add functionality to my standard Lotus environment let me get download the sample code. Well you're screwed. God forbid that you're working on legacy apps (yes that is a dig at GROUP for what I think is a foolish term to use for none XPAGES applications) make the product more valuable and make it harder to switch out by integrating it with more of your systems.

So what happens? The community steps in, you can find the sandbox at the URL http://www.bananahome.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf now I'm glad some enterprising soul has done this and I hope IBM doesn't get it removed until they offer up their alternative, but here's the issue.
1. The code I and many others posted to sandbox wasn't posted for someone else to distribute.
2. How do I know the code etc. on that new site is trusted, how do we know that this person hosted Banana Home hasn't gone in an tweaked the code todo nasty things? We can't.

I'm sure some people may say well the answer is OpenNTF, sure it might be, has IBM moved the posted samples to OpenNTF? Uhm no. Perhaps IBM could use some of their Analytics tools to look at all the links pointing back to sandbox.nsf to realize there is a higher cost in removing sandbox than probably the costs saved in disk space.

A spin off from this, is It does make me wonder about outsourcing your IT operations to the cloud, right now you could still be running a Notes R3 Server and R3 clients if you wanted, you can't get support, but if you chose to do it you could. Maybe there was some key feature in R3 your company used, that was so valuable to the way you do business you could not move off it yet. In the cloud those options go away. Now the cloud will control your update schedule and the features you have access to. Yes, we used to host this product called Lotus XYZ in the cloud, we killed it, now what happens to your business? Something to think about in that larger cloud decision.

Comments

1 - Carl 1. Am happy someone did put this up for us to search for AN app to use.
2. Why would they ? that does not make any sense to me.
3. why did IBM let users replicate to there server ? I know i did wayback and i could find a Copy of it somewhere if i look for it. But i aggree with you on outsourcing your IT operations to the cloud , please be careful who and what you deploy your code and information to. Emoticon

Posted by Palmi At 09:45:33 AM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

2 - Totally agree. We've been moving to Outlook this year. I downloaded a sample database from Sandbox early enough to be able to save our butt's on a couple remediation issues in writing to Outlook Calendar/To Do's from our Notes apps.
Thanks for the link. May need it in future.

Posted by Curt Stone At 10:14:13 AM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

3 - Hi,

Search form doesn't work ... Emoticon

Posted by Satourne At 11:00:04 AM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

4 - I'll be quite surprised if that site survives the week. All the download links throw IBM's license agreement up before the download starts. I have a feeling they'll get a takedown notice from IBM legal REAL fast.

Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 11:06:48 AM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

5 - In answer to the question in your title, I'm surprised by anyone's surprise about this. None of the content in the Sandbox has any license information built into it. Not much of it even has copyright statements built-in. None of the code has been legally vetted in any way, and going back to content that was produced 10 years ago by people who are now, say, Microsoft employees would be enormously expensive.

I'm not saying I like that it was taken down, but if you're asking WHY it was taken down, it's as simple as 3 letters: S, C and O.

Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 11:22:22 AM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

6 - @Carl: I agree with you 110%. IBM shouldn't have taken down the Sandbox, and no one else should have to distribute it in their place. You never know who you can trust out there, and of course that includes me.

I don't think the OpenNTF way to do it would work, unless every hit on the original URL's redirected to the right URL's on OpenNTF.

I also agree about moving things to the cloud, where you really leave it up to someone else to decide what you're allowed to run as your business critical applications.

@Nathan: The reason you get the IBM license agreement, is because the Database is unmodified from what was on IBM's site. Hence the same license agreement that was there before, is still there. Some layout, JavaScript, CSS, and images is missing, though, since that wasn't contained in the original database.

Posted by Peter von Stöckel At 11:57:10 AM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

7 - @Peter - I understand completely WHY the IBM license agreement appears there. I'm saying that IBM legal is going to object to someone else distributing software under IBM's site agreement.

Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 12:04:08 PM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

8 - @Nathan: You might very well be right about that. We'll just have to wait and see if they get in touch with me on the subject.

I'd also like to take this moment to push my IdeaJam Idea, which was prompted by Carl's blog entry: { Link }

Posted by Peter von Stöckel At 12:40:34 PM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

9 - @Nathan, It's been up for 2,5 months. So either IBM legal is sleeping behind the wheel or OK with it.

Posted by Vitor Pereira At 04:44:51 PM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

10 - @9 - Yeah, I'm gonna go with option 1. Emoticon

Hey, if it stays up, I'll be just as happy as anyone.

Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 08:56:51 PM On 12/02/2010 | - Website - |

11 - I could not agree with you more. I can see big problems with the cloud. Especially outside the US and N. Europe, where the internet connections are not good or where there are frequent outages. I can see no real long term value to having your systems in the cloud.

I have never seen any costings that will actually show a real saving.

This is especially true for SMB's. They will typically have 1 or 2 servers no more and run Domino Express and a file sharing server. They back up to a NAS and then to a tape, all of this cost is reasonable, the only monthly fee they have is there ISP and the Salary of 1 IT staff. What is the monthly cost of having 100 users in the cloud????

Posted by Nick Halliwell At 12:36:48 AM On 12/03/2010 | - Website - |

12 - As long as major cloud player undercharge for their services I would say that 100 users in the cloud often is not more expensive. For example Collaboration Express is going up 10% while cloud seems to not increase pricing.
The difference between Passport Advantage Renewal and cloud is not much. Add some additional stuff like backup, anti-virus or compliance tools and you lose against the cloud just on license cost.
For the legacy term I think this now is a valid one. IBM does not put this stuff further. It is now in some way as legacy as VB6. Maybe one should not call it legacy for marketing reasons but why not say it as it is!?
For the sandbox. The code now is becoming 4 years old. There is no XPages stuff there. It is feed for those who can't or don't want to move forward for whatever reason.
There are good reasons to keep the sandbox up but for IBM it does not make much sense.
I haven't looked at the sandbox for a long time and I don't miss it much. If I would work in a Notes 7 (or older) environment my opinion could be different.

Posted by Henning Heinz At 04:39:54 AM On 12/03/2010 | - Website - |

13 - @11 You're making the mistake of thinking there is only notes code in sandbox Henning.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 04:44:15 AM On 12/03/2010 | - Website - |

14 - Indeed I did only think of code. That I do not miss the sandbox for sure does not mean that everyone else should too. Well not completely true. When the sandbox was alive and well I used it a lot.

Posted by Henning Heinz At 06:22:19 AM On 12/03/2010 | - Website - |

15 - Back in the day when I actively worked with Lotus technology, the Sandbox was one of my must use resources that saved my butt on more than one occasion.

Posted by Christopher Byrne At 02:47:11 PM On 12/03/2010 | - Website - |