[HN Gopher] How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based...
___________________________________________________________________
How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing
application
Author : nephics
Score : 520 points
Date : 2021-03-11 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.indiehackers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.indiehackers.com)
| meijer wrote:
| Pretty great. This is how I would like to work, too.
|
| Of course, it would be nice to know how much money the author
| makes with this product...
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Clicking through, there is this page:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/product/open3a
|
| It mentions 9k/mo.
| protomyth wrote:
| _In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It 's called
| open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which
| I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for
| their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's
| fully remote managed and monitored by me_
|
| This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It
| reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant
| contractors would try it.
| tyingq wrote:
| I'd be a bit wary of something as important as invoices on the
| Rpi storage though. Hopefully there's some automatic backup.
| javajosh wrote:
| Or buy two or more put them on the same subnet and let them
| replicate. More money!
| gen220 wrote:
| You can boot the RPI off of an SSD nowadays, or boot off an
| SD card with the root file system on an SSD.
|
| I also used to be concerned about persisting data on a RPIs
| because of the SD card problem.
|
| But this setup is quite comparable to a standard Linux box
| with no replication. From there you can setup ZFS if you care
| to, or be satisfied with daily backups to the cloud.
| tyingq wrote:
| I poked around and found her product page for the Rpi
| device, and she does couple it with a 120GB SSD and two USB
| sticks for backup. https://www.open3a.de/page-open3ABox
| gen220 wrote:
| Oh, nice! I've never thought about using flash for
| backups, that's a very nice trade-off of for form factor
| and cost efficiency.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Also as this is managed solution, I would offer encrypted
| offsite "cloud" storage.
|
| Any part of the box fails? Send over a new one the next
| day which will automatically pull all saved data once the
| login/password is typed on the setup page.
| bityard wrote:
| Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone
| mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is:
|
| 1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of
| course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better
| SD cards, like ones with high write endurance.
|
| 2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from
| any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.
| GordonS wrote:
| As this point, it's practically a meme.
|
| I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my
| brother works for an oil services company, and they have
| deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly
| in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you
| can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty
| hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a
| _single_ failure across all these devices in over 5 years.
| Not one - and they boot from SD cards!
|
| The stuff running on the RPis isn't very write heavy, and
| the cases are only lightly ruggedised (I forget the brand,
| but they are consumer gear, nothing fancy), and I forget
| what brand the SD cards are - but this is why I roll my
| eyes every time this is mentioned on HN (which is _every_
| time RPi is mentioned on HN). I really wonder what fraction
| of people repeating this reliability claim even have an
| RPi.
| thunfischbrot wrote:
| While I am not one of those commenting on such issues
| except for your prompt-my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has
| been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast.
| Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good.
| Had this at happen in at least eight instances.
| Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power
| loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and
| production environments, unless you take great care.
|
| Younger generations have not had these issues for me.
| While I assigned that to my experience, usually reducing
| logging to sd card, booting off of USB and fewer
| unexpected power losses, it may simply not be an issue
| any more.
| bekindandopen wrote:
| Could you expand more on the "mobile land rigs"?
|
| I've always wondered if any organizations have tried to
| make something like a Sandcrawler.
| tyingq wrote:
| I brought it up because it was being sold as an appliance
| type device with invoice data on it, to be sold to probably
| non-technical customers. Not just as a random gripe. I did
| reply, after finding that specific product page, with an
| update that she is shipping it with a real drive.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Can a RPi4 bought before the USB boot was added have it
| enabled?
| michrassena wrote:
| I definitely had this issue with the first generation
| Raspberry Pi. It wasn't just a corrupted filesystem. The SD
| card was completely ruined. When I started over, I followed
| instructions to make the file system readonly, turn off the
| tmpfs, turn off atime, etc. And never had another issue.
| Eventually I replaced the Pi with a newer one and haven't
| had any problems even though the file system is read/write.
| I think this issue may have affected the earlier models
| more, or maybe SD cards are better now.
| ohazi wrote:
| It's _much_ easier to buy industrial [1] and high endurance
| [2] microSD cards now. SanDisk /WD started selling them to
| the public due to the popularity of dashcams that record
| continuously. No more buying cards on digikey from a
| manufacturer you'd never heard of for 10x the price.
|
| I haven't seen reports of these particular cards being
| counterfeited yet, but still... you probably shouldn't buy
| them from Amazon...
|
| [1] https://www.westerndigital.com/products/commercial-
| removable...
|
| [2] https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/memory-
| cards/sandis...
| atleta wrote:
| This has been a usual business model for larger vendors (and
| servers): selling appliances. Google also did it (I think it
| was for intranet search), it was also one of the story threads
| in the Silicon Valley sitcom (see "the box").
|
| When I launched my first startup, I also did something similar.
| Though we were selling a service: we'd deliver it as a 'box'
| (my co-founder actually called it 'the box' - before SV was
| aired :) ). It was in 2011, and we didn't have the RasPi back
| then so we used something called the SheevaPlug [1] . It didn't
| have a display port, which we'd needed later on, but it was
| great for plug'n'play'n'forget installation. (Actually one of
| these is still running at one of our first customers, even
| though the backing service has been shut down ~5 years ago.
| Probably nobody knows any more what it's doing and they just
| think 'better not touch'.)
|
| It's the easiest and most logical way to deliver some of the
| software/services. It mostly depends on whether it's something
| you want to interact with on your own machine (and a single
| machine) or whether you want to have it always running and/or
| multiple people to access it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
| davidw wrote:
| And having a physical object adds some scarcity into the mix,
| which you need:
|
| https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-
| scarcity...
| atleta wrote:
| In our case it wasn't the point. It was more about the plug
| and play (literally, since it was a background music
| service) vs "install and then keep it running all the
| time". We had a local competitor and funny enough they
| pitched themselves with saying "you don't need any special
| hardware". I.e. they didn't get that it was indeed a
| feature.
|
| But it was an interesting read.
| varispeed wrote:
| I wonder if you still need to go through expensive UL and other
| testing before being able to market such product? The RPi has
| an integrator programme, but still there are potentially large
| fees to pay which makes whole thing not so attractive unless
| you are going to wing it and hope nobody will check.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| Yup. That raspberry pi with stuff on it is a clever way of
| addressing a wider market. :-)
|
| If you're clever or worried about business continuity you can
| learn from the practices of some enterprise it providers and
| add built in self checks, call home, and even charge for
| preventative maintenance. For example, "We noticed your dongle
| is overheating / having flash issues / whatever and not running
| optimally. Here's a replacement." Or - "we noticed that your
| dongle hasn't been used in a while. Is it ok?"
| myth2018 wrote:
| That would be cool indeed.
|
| Besides, depending on the reliability of the available
| internet connection, it might be also useful (and easy) to
| add an embedded mobile connection as a fail over.
|
| I know a guy who had some issues for that reason. The quality
| of the customer's LAN was extremely poor, but the customer
| (out of ignorance, bad faith or both, it wasn't clear) always
| blamed his software.
| II2II wrote:
| Things that I like about her account: it is sounds like a modest
| success story with an end that is within reach of more people and
| places more emphasis on the value of work instead of getting rich
| quick. The part about her product being open source will also
| appeal to a certain audience.
| mosaic_school wrote:
| Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand
| the meaning of "open source software".
|
| It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have
| the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by
| following an open source license? (
| https://opensource.org/licenses )
|
| P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.
| snthd wrote:
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
| pizzazzaro wrote:
| This is the difference between Free Software - the Stallman
| brainchild - and "Open Source" software.
|
| Free Software? Is entirely about end user freedom. Open Source?
| Makes concessions for software writers to make money.
|
| I'd rather live in a Free Software world. But, seeing how I
| need to eat and pay bills in a Capitalist Economy? The Open
| Source Initiative (OSI) formed specifically to make business
| friendly licenses, for businesses to support this endeavor.
|
| Im weirded out by the fact that a GPL-derived licensed can be
| used here. I kinda want to investigate if this one was already
| planned as a concession to economics, or whether it emerged in
| response to pressures.
| boomlinde wrote:
| _> Please correct me if I 'm wrong but this is not how I
| understand the meaning of "open source software"._
|
| So you've made the assumption that it's distributed under a
| source access only license, but instead of verifying that
| assumption, you're asking others to correct the conclusions you
| draw from it.
| nvr219 wrote:
| To paraphrase Cunningham's Law: Posting the wrong answer is
| the best way to get the right answer.
| gwd wrote:
| I read an article recently which advised purposely saying
| something which you knew to be incorrect in order to
| kickstart a conversation with someone.
|
| "What do you do?" "Software development." "What kind of
| software?" [back and forth, question-and-short-answer at a
| time]
|
| "What do you do?" "Software development." "Oh, so you like
| write websites and stuff?" "No, actually, [long
| enthusiastic explanation of their job]"
| twodave wrote:
| I've found I do this, but the reason I tend to
| (especially in technical conversations) is to try and
| establish a shared vocabulary. Often times I find that I
| understand the words people are saying but not enough of
| the context. Injecting an example of my own helps anchor
| the conversation for me and keeps the exchange of ideas
| going.
| gwd wrote:
| I didn't realize until you said it, but yes, I do this
| for technical discussions too. Sometimes I've volunteered
| to write up a description of an issue on which I'm
| knowledgeable but not an expert, and when it comes to
| write it up, I realize there are subtleties about the
| situation that I didn't understand. So I just make my
| best guess as to what I think the situation might be, and
| post it to people who _are_ the experts, knowing they 'll
| correct any mistakes. It is indeed a much more effective
| way of getting someone to explain something than going
| back and forth with questions.
| nephics wrote:
| As far as I can tell it is AGPL licensed PHP code, you can
| download the code, run it, and modify/fork it freely. Code is
| open source, but it is not developed in the open.
| yakubin wrote:
| The article doesn't mention GPL. It's unlikely that this code
| is GPL-licensed. Moreover, yeah, probably the customer can
| modify the code, but can they resell it or share it with
| someone else for free? If not, it's not open source.
|
| From "The Open Source Definition"[1]:
|
| _> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or
| giving away the software as a component of an aggregate
| software distribution containing programs from several
| different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or
| other fee for such sale._
|
| [1]: <https://opensource.org/osd>
|
| UPDATE: it seems it is licensed under AGPLv3. So it is open
| source. Interesting.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| I'm sure I've spend less time downloading the zip, opening
| it, and seeing a "agpl.txt" file than you did writting that
| comment.
| yakubin wrote:
| I don't see a link to it in the article. I've only
| noticed where it is after another commenter linked to it.
| nvr219 wrote:
| It says open source in the title.
|
| Turns out it is open source.
|
| "Interesting"
|
| Like... why did you expect it to not be open source
| prepend wrote:
| "I'm contradicting the author without validating my
| claim. And it's super easy to validate my claim, but I
| just didn't. When confronted, I complain that it takes
| greater than 10 seconds to verify my claim."
|
| This is curious behavior. There's lots of incorrect and
| misleading articles. But I try to bring up questions only
| when exhausting reasonable investigations.
| yakubin wrote:
| 1. There is no link in the article to the zip file.
|
| 2. Searching for open3A in duckduckgo brings me to a page
| that spits out PHP errors and doesn't give me anything.
|
| 3. The only way that I now know where the zip file is, is
| because another commenter linked to it.
|
| 4. We've seen companies disguise something as open-
| source, when it wasn't.
|
| 5. Open source is commonly hard-to-sell.
|
| So no, it wasn't 10 seconds to verify and the author
| didn't make it particularly easy to do so. My doubts are
| completely natural, given past news in "open-source". Are
| you commenting in bad faith?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Fascinating. I consider myself to have reasonable mastery
| of my tools and I usually pick good tools for my
| purposes.
|
| Here's a re-enactment of how I detected the license:
| https://i.imgur.com/Gr4xMT5.mp4
|
| It's near trivially easy.
| la_fayette wrote:
| Haha so cool!
| prepend wrote:
| Did you record that with lice cap?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I used the Quicktime Player screen-record feature in OS
| X. Though thanks for the rec.
|
| Here's another one I like when I want my face and audio
| in: Screenity https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity
| (very easy code to work with too).
| nemiah wrote:
| Funny to see you do that on my website :D
| touggourt wrote:
| Basicaly you are just explaining that you've just done a
| very quick search. Fact that Duckduckgo doesn't gives the
| right answer an the first page is not an excuse.
| Actually, DDG printed a lots of comparison pages of
| business application for me, so I changed my search
| string, tried elsewhere, searched on indiehackers.com
| where she writed the post. This is more completely
| natural that becoming suspicious from nothing.
|
| BTW typing only "open3A" in DDG gaves me the right
| answers all on the first page.
| prepend wrote:
| It definitely could be easier.
|
| I searched for "open3A" via Google (not ddg, but if I got
| errors on ddg, I would try "!open3a") and the first hit
| is a German site. I don't speak German, but I saw the
| download link [0] and downloaded the first zip and viewed
| the license.
|
| I spent more time downloading the 4mb zip than clicking
| on stuff.
|
| It's not the author's job to make answering my questions
| easy. It is my job to not make easily verifiable claims
| without trying.
|
| I've dealt with lots of projects that are crappy about
| licenses and frequently have to download the tarball to
| look for licenses, just to check if I can actually use.
|
| The author could make this easier, but she didn't. That
| doesn't mean I should go into attack mode because other
| people make bad claims. (And I suppose I give up after 10
| seconds and don't want to stick around for 20 seconds)
|
| I also noticed that author doesn't even link to her
| project. Maybe it's because her project is in German and
| the blog is English. But I'd rather have more posts like
| this with whatever time the author can spend, than wait
| for it to sit in draft while unimportant details are
| finally added.
|
| [0] https://www.open3a.de/page-Download
| nemiah wrote:
| My intention with this blog post was only to write down
| my story. No marketing intended :)
| II2II wrote:
| There is a trail of links from the article that will
| bring you to the download. Click on the author's name to
| see their profile, click on the project to see the
| project's profile, click on the link to the project
| website, then click on the link to the downloads page.
| While the trail is a bit much, it is important to keep in
| mind the article was an account of the author's
| experiences and it published on a portal for indie
| developers. A direct link may not have been seen as
| appropriate given the context.
|
| While I agree with companies misrepresenting their
| products as open source as being a problem and believe
| the AGPL should have been mentioned, I do not see how the
| point about open source being hard to sell as being
| relevant. Not only are there are success stories in the
| world of open source, but the author made their success
| sound modest.
| amenod wrote:
| Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means, it is
| sometimes (often even?) used as a synonym for "source
| available", as opposed to "free software" (which is the term
| that FSF promotes).
|
| I'm not saying which term is better, just explaining why "open
| source" might not be objectively wrong in this case.
| orangeshark wrote:
| > Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means,
| it is sometimes (often even?) used as a synonym for "source
| available"
|
| Where do they define this? In the OSI definition it doesn't
| mention having the source available for everyone, only that
| whoever has the program should be able to get the source[0].
| I do believe it doesn't follow "open source" the development
| model where development is in the open and anyone can
| contribute.
|
| [0] https://opensource.org/osd
| indymike wrote:
| This application falls in the commercial open source bucket.
| There's actually quite a bit of it, especially software
| written in interpreted languages.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means
|
| They define what _they_ think it clearly means to _them_...
| but they don 't own the term.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Though most open source licensed projects allow anyone to come
| along and access the source, the strict interpretation of the
| GPL for instance, is that those rights are only extended to
| customers/users of the software. Those customers are perfectly
| within their rights to distribute it openly in turn - but as I
| understand it, neither the the copywrite holder(s) of the
| source nor the providers transmitting a GPL project to an end
| user are obligated to provide a copy to any person who asks.
| Only that particular user who was provided the binary.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You can download [1] the latest release of open3a to find not
| only the PHP source code, but also an AGPL license. This isn't
| open contribution software (no public Gitlab project to do pull
| requests and such) but the source code itself seems perfectly
| open source.
|
| Even still, open source licenses may be used to sell software
| for which the source code is not available before purchase. For
| example, the Apache 2.0 license can be used for this; it
| protects users of altered versions of the source code from
| patent infringement lawsuits and forces the Apache license to
| be passed on to the end users of the modified work. It doesn't
| forbid throwing the source onto a repository somewhere, of
| course, so the source doesn't remain closed for long, but I can
| imagine many businesses wouldn't want to sell their technical
| support to a company that published their source code, and
| businesses are generally wary of using software without any
| form of support.
|
| There's various ways people use the term "open source" and I
| think in general people mean "software that's available
| publicly for free" when they use it, but some of the open
| source licenses allow for some propietary-like behaviour while
| using them.
|
| [1]: https://www.open3a.de/page-Download
| [deleted]
| npsimons wrote:
| > It sounds rather like customers get source access.
|
| Technically, you could provide binaries and a GPL license, then
| provide source code when verified customers (eg they send their
| receipt/license number with their request) ask for it.
|
| IANAL, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing in GPL that
| says you can't sell the software and operate this way. If your
| customers hand out the binaries to third parties, that's on
| them to provide the GPL and source code, not you. And of
| course, they could sell, re-release, etc, but anyone else could
| come and do the same to them.
|
| It's risky, to be sure, and it feels "wrong" only because we've
| become conditioned to the status quo of so-called "intellectual
| property". Frankly, I would love if I could write open source
| software for a living, but there's a big fear of letting go of
| a steady paycheck (and benefits!), but that has more to do with
| entrepreneurship fears than software licenses.
| neophiite wrote:
| That's the business model of grsecurity (selling security
| patches for the linux kernel). They have an additional clause
| that if you re-sell/re-release the patches, you lose access
| to future patches. It's controversial.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| grsecurity's policy is such a fascinating end-run against
| the usual redistribution freedom associated with open
| source.
|
| "Sure you can redistribute the software. We'll just cut you
| off if you do."
|
| But suing Bruce Perens for saying that this is a legal risk
| is a pretty bad look for grsecurity...
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/27/grsecurity_bruce_per
| e...
| alexdowad wrote:
| If nemiah is reading these comments... well done! Loved your
| story!
| nemiah wrote:
| Actually I am, thank you! Having quite some fun now :D
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| The demo site is in German; a language selector is not obviously
| findable.
|
| It's also excruciatingly slow to load! "Let the software speak
| for itself" - well, it did - if I were evaluating invoicing
| software I'd go look elsewhere mainly based on this very poor
| first impression. Could certainly use some optimization / speed
| up.
| tasogare wrote:
| > The demo site is in German
|
| The target market is probably Germany. The post mentions amount
| of money in euros, but never other currencies used in English-
| speaking countries. It make sense to not internationalize the
| website if the product doesn't fit the international market (I
| bet invoices have different legal requirements everywhere).
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| And yet the blog article is in English and it was promoted in
| an English site (hacker news :)
| scbrg wrote:
| The "blog" article is in English because it's posted in an
| English speaking community (who are presumably more
| interested in the story than the software itself).
|
| It's "promoted" on HN by someone other than the author, it
| seems.
| nemiah wrote:
| No, wasn't me. I actually decided against posting the
| link here.
| nvr219 wrote:
| The blog is about the author's experience not about the
| software itself
| cosmodisk wrote:
| German speaking market is big enough and rich enough to
| solely focus on it+less competition compared to English
| speaking countries.
| christogreeff wrote:
| Yeah, from the comments on the blog: "The German market would
| be Germany, Switzerland and Austria. That's over a hundred
| million people. Works for me "
| sltkr wrote:
| The site feels rather snappy to me. The backend is powered by
| PHP; most pages load in 100-200 ms, which is very reasonable.
| I've certainly used much, much slower software, especially for
| business purposes.
|
| Maybe the demo site is suffering from whatever the hacker news
| equivalent of slashdotting is, or the host might not be well-
| connected to the internet outside Europe.
| Shadonototro wrote:
| it's a full featured 2mb web app
|
| it is not a bloated 20mb C# blazor simple todo mvc web app lol
| jensus wrote:
| found the site and app to be very snappy with a connection from
| England. Might give more understanding to your experience if
| you added some context, location, internet speed ect.
| christogreeff wrote:
| You might need to consider that she didn't intend for HN
| volumes of traffic. Also, it loaded fine for me.
| nemiah wrote:
| Nope, I did not ;)
| antattack wrote:
| "I have a free version of open3A which is as useful as possible
| without any limits but of course it is missing advanced
| functionality. This version gets full support by me via phone and
| email."
|
| I think that providing support for free version is somewhat
| unique, however it does make sense - the longer people use her
| software the more likely they purchase add-on or subscription.
| imhoguy wrote:
| It depends on customer base. This is B2B solution so I assume
| when she picks up the phone the caller is someone who values
| own time.
|
| That way she can hear about frequent needs of users who don't
| buy the thing when it lacks some essential feature, also could
| upsell existing extensions or the boxed version. Customers
| often have no idea of potential the software offers.
|
| Simply it is support+marketing+sales number.
| nemiah wrote:
| I do this because I'm in it for the long run. Sure, maybe it
| won't pay off, but my "first directive" is, to get people to
| use my open3A. If they've put all their data in it and miss
| some feature in the future it is more probable that they will
| just buy it from me instead of going through the hassle of
| moving to another solution. If they have a good support
| experience that just gives them a better feeling with my
| software.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| I made a great deal of money for a few years providing training
| and support for the founders of a popular mature open source
| project.
|
| There's no customer success team for open source software, I
| don't care how good the community is. A significant chunk of the
| money charged for my services went back to the founders to
| continue their work. This is a fantastic model for open source.
|
| I encourage more people to connect with the founders of popular
| projects and arrange a system whereby you can offer training and
| support on their behalf and in their name (obviously they should
| vet you). I'm happy to discuss the particulars of this, including
| how to sell training and support, how to handle contracts,
| logistics, all of it. I know this business well and I think it is
| a net good for all involved. Email is in by bio.
| kfk wrote:
| This makes sense. I am working with dask and it will become
| harder to keep this running in our "enterprise" aws setup as
| it's open source with no vetted credible support company
| behind.
| yboris wrote:
| I sell my MIT open source _Video Hub App_ for $5 ($3.50 goes to a
| cost-effective charity - it 's charityware). Over the 3 years
| it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from
| malaria.
|
| Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/
|
| GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
|
| Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-
| with-pro...
| xwdv wrote:
| I would love to build charity ware to help offset some of the
| ethically questionable things I do, but I was wondering how did
| you choose a cause to donate toward? Did you know someone
| personally who perished from malaria? There's so many things
| that can be donated to I don't know how to pick one or evaluate
| where donations would even be most effective.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Efforts work best when they are focused on helping with a
| problem that you have direct experience with.
|
| I think the long term large impact of pushing back against
| these ethically questionable things, even at the expense of
| your long term career earnings potential, would have a better
| result for society.
|
| If you can't push back on that stuff internally, consider
| publicizing the behaviors and starting a conversation around
| them.
|
| Don't just dump money into a charity to assauge your
| conscience.
| yboris wrote:
| Efforts work best when they are focused on _cost-effective_
| interventions, not things you have direct experience with.
|
| Just about 100% of the US population have no experience
| with malaria. Yet it costs about $2 to provide a
| insecticide-treated net that protects on average 2 people
| for 2-3 years from malaria (while they sleep -- a common
| time for malaria transmission). There is arguably nothing
| you can do with $2 of resources in the US that can do as
| much good as this.
|
| So, please focus on _cost-effective_ charities with a
| proven track record, that use evidence-based methods to
| help individuals, and do it in a transparent way (so you
| know what 's happening when you donate). To make it easier,
| start with _GiveWell_ - an independent charity evaluator:
| https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
| prionassembly wrote:
| Then, it's possible that nets are being distributed by
| evil people who make their victims kneel for hours before
| getting help. (This is extreme, but it could involve
| things diametrically opposed to your values; maybe Islam
| is being spread in traditional animistic societies[0],
| destroying traditional culture; maybe they're micro-
| chipping these people.) Cost-effectiveness is a good
| metric, but if you know _nothing_ about what 's involved
| in curing malaria...
|
| ---
|
| [0] Semi-relatedly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sav
| e_the_Children_Fund_Fil...
| yboris wrote:
| Exactly the reason everyone should do research before
| giving to charity. Since unlike products you buy, which
| you can test out and even return, charitable donations
| provide you with no feedback, you must research
| charities.
|
| The great news is GiveWell has been doing this for over a
| decade (full time!) and has excellent recommendations.
|
| https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
| tsmigiel wrote:
| I use givewell.org to find charities. From their home page:
|
| "We search for the charities that save or improve lives the
| most per dollar."
|
| They appear to be pretty transparent about how they choose
| charities to recommend. I don't want to misrepresent them, so
| please check out their site if you want more details.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Donating money is an act of self-expression. Do learn about
| effective altruism, cost-effectiveness, impact, etc. but know
| that it will ultimately reflect your values. Donate to
| African wildlife if you're fascinated by lions and zebras.
|
| I donate to Wikipedia and the archive.org. I practice
| _rational ignorance_ : I estimate that the costs of learning
| more about effective charity are far above the costs of doing
| it wrong. Maybe Wikipedia uses the money to create more and
| more small-fry side-projects (Wiki-maps, wiki-this, wiki-
| that). Maybe it funds Wikifeet, which is thoroughly weird. I
| don't care -- Wikipedia is one of the greatest
| accomplishments of _H. sapiens sapiens_.
|
| (Malaria is still a big problem, and it's so cheaply improved
| upon -- if that touches your heart, go for it!)
| thewakalix wrote:
| Effective altruism isn't opposed to your values. It's about
| achieving your values as much as possible, given resource
| constraints. If your values are different from most EAs,
| then you'll have a different criterion for "effectiveness".
| prionassembly wrote:
| Effective altruism is _a value_. A practicing Catholic
| may find the most effective interventions to be against
| their religion. A less strict Christian may feel that
| effectiveness overrules religious directives. In any
| case, you 're operating under _your values_.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Altruism is simply a concern for others. In broad sense
| it can mean that you care whether others get more value
| (according to either receivers' opinion or your opinion
| about values).
|
| "Effective" just means you don't want to waste money or
| time on values not important (according to either
| receivers' opinion or your opinion).
|
| The fact that Givewell chooses certain values (the
| rational ones) and Christianity slightly different values
| is orthogonal to the concept of altruism.
|
| Even if I believed in Flying Spaghetti Monster I could
| care whether others have a steady supply of macaroni.
| This makes me an altruist in my book. And I could act
| effectively about it. But I wouldn't complain about
| Givewell in that case.
|
| And that's why I don't like conflating rationalism with
| effective altruism. It's just another case of emotional
| loading of a phrase.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
| yboris wrote:
| I focus on _cost-effectiveness_ of charities. Thankfully I
| can rely on the 10+ years of full-time research by a great
| team at _GiveWell_. The charity I chose is _Against Malaria
| Foundation_ which is the top-rated charity by GiveWell:
|
| https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
|
| ps - I also, for 10 years now, give at least 10% of my income
| (aside from this project) to cost-effective charities as per
| my pledge through _Giving What We Can_
| https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ -- this is one of many
| initiatives that fall under the umbrella of EA (Effective
| Altruism) https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
| lenkite wrote:
| Doesn't Plex already provide a desktop app that does this ?
| https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/
| _benj wrote:
| You know, that kind of thinking is usually what deters me
| from building something, but I've come to realize that I (or
| HN crowd for that matter) is my customer.
|
| A quick glance at the Plex site vs his shows a different
| appeal. One is a "Free Movies & TV" something, while the
| other is "Like YouTube for videos on your computer"
|
| I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way :-) I'm not
| picking on you or on plex or anything... I'm just wanted to
| point out how the thinking patter of "but you can do that
| with [enter FOSS name here]" has been often paralyzing for
| me.
| yboris wrote:
| The key feature I wanted for VHA was the ability to scroll
| through thumbnails without having to be connected to hard
| drive where videos reside. This is particularly great when
| you have many external hard drives and/or remote volumes but
| just want to see if you have a particular video already.
|
| With my app, clicking opens the video with your default video
| player. At the moment you cannot stream to another device
| (though it's a feature I'm hoping to add in one day).
| mraza007 wrote:
| Pretty cool product. I have a very similar product but my
| question is that how did you convinced the users to pay for the
| product if its already free
| prionassembly wrote:
| The charity aspect is a strong motivator for many people.
|
| Maybe George Costanza's idea -- The Human Fund, Money for
| People -- needs to be revisited.
| yboris wrote:
| It's not "free" in the sense that there's a download button
| for it. 99.9% of the people wouldn't be readily able to build
| the app from source.
|
| Given I've spent 3 years building it, I feel comfortable
| selling it for this price. When I first released the app I
| didn't have the source code available; so it's more like a
| "commercial product" with the source code available if anyone
| is interested.
| echelon wrote:
| Have you ever thought about charging more?
| yboris wrote:
| It's scary. I sell about 120 copies per month. I suspect
| charging more will drop it down to fewer than 100 copies.
| I'd rather more people use the app.
|
| I will be working on adding facial recognition; I might
| have a pricier option for facial recognition features
| perhaps.
| echelon wrote:
| I've never had the experience of pricing a product, but
| my intuition tells me this could be a win. We
| occasionally see articles on HN that describe how to
| increase prices without losing your audience.
|
| Perhaps there are others here that can offer feedback and
| advice.
|
| Research and experiment. If you do embark on this, a
| postmortem write-up with your learnings would be a great
| read.
|
| Best of luck with whatever your plans are. It's a cool
| app!
| yboris wrote:
| Thank you! For the reference, until I released version
| 3.0.0 (last November) the price was $3.50 (and all of it
| went to charity). The number of sales didn't take a hit -
| but it coincided with some publicity and major
| improvements to the app.
| mraza007 wrote:
| Oh I see, yes I was a little curious that product source
| code is available and I wonder why people are still paying
| for the product but you just made it clear with your answer
|
| thanks man !!
| jjice wrote:
| I was actually looking for something just like this since I
| won't have access to my Jellyfin server for a while. This looks
| perfect.
| xnyan wrote:
| You should buy this guy's application, but also keep in mind
| you can put Jellyfin on any Mac/Linux/Windows box and connect
| to it locally from your web browser. Obviously you'd also
| have to move any video you want to watch offline to your
| travel computer, but that's true for any offline viewing.
| scottlamb wrote:
| Kudos to the author!
|
| I don't get this part:
|
| > In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called
| open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which
| I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for
| their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's
| fully remote managed and monitored by me more steady income, yay
|
| When people object to cloud (SaaS really), I tend to think it's
| about what you could variously describe as ownership, control,
| privacy, and security. They want to be the only ones who can
| access their data. They want updates to happen on their schedule.
| If you want the developer to manage and monitor your
| installation, why not use a hosted version?
|
| Another reason is bandwidth, but I wouldn't expect that to be a
| significant consideration for invoicing software.
| twodave wrote:
| My thoughts exactly--Having a fleet of client-side machinery
| open to the Internet sounds like a larger overall risk
| footprint than having one hosted solution. I'm guessing a bit
| part of this is just customer psychology and lack of education.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Why do you think it is opened to the Internet? May be just a
| box behind a NAT calling home and/or be part of closed VPN
| swarm.
|
| I would love to hear how the management part got implemented.
| nemiah wrote:
| The management works like this:
|
| Every open3ABox has an open websocket connection to my
| server. I do the monitoring over this connection and for
| updates and support I tell the box over the websocket
| connection to forward a port via ssh to my server. The port
| will be automatically closed by the open3ABox after three
| hours.
|
| This means no constantly open port and an encrypted
| connection where only my server is allowed to do a remote
| function execution (get monitoring values, open port, etc.)
| on the box.
| bityard wrote:
| There are plenty of cases where I want to own a thing, but make
| someone else responsible for managing it. And if they fail or
| go away, I want to know that I can hire someone else to manage
| it instead.
|
| If the app is hosted entirely in the cloud, _everything_ is
| gone if the provider pulls the plug suddenly. If the app is
| hosted on a device that I own and the provider goes away, it
| will probably still keep working for a while. Worst case, I
| still at least have the option of hiring someone to crack it
| open and extract the data to import someone else.
|
| This is such an important concept that it even has its own
| field of study and practice called "business continuity." Many
| business have legal agreements with customers and partners
| _requiring_ this.
| scottlamb wrote:
| It's a given that you should have backups of your business
| data, no matter if you're using a hosted installation or a
| local one. With backups, if the hosted provider pulls the
| plug, you don't lose _everything_. You may be scrambling to
| set up the replacement but you have your data, and in this
| case you'd also have the source code, so you'll survive.
|
| And keep in mind that "Raspberry Pi fails" is a more common
| scenario than "provider goes out of business", so from the
| perspective of minimizing the scramble, that's the one I'd be
| more concerned about.
|
| A bit more about backups: for something truly important, you
| should have an offline copy, in case a malicious party
| compromises credentials that can be used to overwrite both
| the primary and the backup. I don't think you should depend
| on the vendor backing up your data. Some things you just have
| to do yourself, unfortunately.
| nemiah wrote:
| I offer open3ABox this way for the customers that have fewer
| technical abilities and don't want a cloud service.
|
| They usually use the Windows version but don't do backups and
| if something fails it's a nightmare to support.
| okprod wrote:
| If it's AGPL it's free software, not open source
| CameronBanga wrote:
| The Open Source Initiative recognizes AGPL as an open source
| license -> https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0
| okprod wrote:
| The FSF recognizes AGPL as a free software license.
| scbrg wrote:
| Where did you get the idea that open source and free
| software are mutually exclusive?
| fsflover wrote:
| It's both, i.e. FLOSS.
| okprod wrote:
| No, it's not both. Open source is a business model. AGPL is a
| free software license. Look at Wikipedia, or ask the license
| holder, the FSF.
| orangeshark wrote:
| It is both. Here[0] is GNU comparing them. The Open Source
| Initiative also has their definition[1] of Open Source.
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
|
| [1] https://opensource.org/osd
| a2tech wrote:
| I wonder if they would do better with an English version of their
| website? I was looking for something exactly like this early last
| year and I found no mention of it (and googling in English
| doesn't bring it up now either).
| wila wrote:
| Someone in the comments asked about this.
|
| She is fine with only targeting the German market, it is big
| enough for her.
| gnulinux wrote:
| ITT: People who didn't read the article, argue how GPL would make
| this business model impossible, not realizing code in the article
| is AGPL licensed. smh, I expected better from HN.
| dang wrote:
| The trouble with comments like this is that they make the
| thread even worse by amplifying what they're complaining about
| (and adding a layer of meta on top).
|
| It's much better to dampen bad stuff by downvoting/flagging it
| and/or amplify good stuff by contributing interesting things.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Following the recent events, wait until multinational corporation
| x comes, repackages your software as a managed solution, hosted
| on their infrastructure and resells it through their channels.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Online invoicing is hardly an area unexplored by large
| corporate SaaS companies. The world is a big place and it seems
| he's found a niche he can make money in.
| fsflover wrote:
| Multinational corporations typically are very afraid of AGPLv3.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| See my comment as a snarky reply to the recent HN threads
| about the aws/elastic debate, not as a serious contribution.
|
| Although on a more serious note, I can clearly remember self
| appointed knights of FOSS claiming on those threads that AGPL
| is bad because it harms adoption.
|
| I see it more as a form of protection against corporate
| exploitation, apparently OP does too.
| williesleg wrote:
| I make my living using open source software. Now I'll write a
| blog with ads and profit!
| vmception wrote:
| I thought this would be about the repository maintainers of
| obscure but used dependencies, who then that sell to random
| passerbys who then make the dependency malicious
|
| Because I would like to read about that experience
| heeen2 wrote:
| Similar project for time tracking and invoice generation:
| https://www.kimai.org/
| koonsolo wrote:
| I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the
| project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how
| many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source.
|
| Asking this because sometimes I also wonder if I should open
| source my project, but I have my doubts on how much you can gain
| from it (apart from the nice feeling of contributing to open
| source ;))
| nemiah wrote:
| Sometimes a client sends me some code to put in my version for
| future updates. But other than that, I don't work with
| contributions.
|
| It's more the feeling for me, yes :)
| gregmac wrote:
| > I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the
| project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or
| how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open
| source.
|
| Contributors is easy to judge, but the second bit is not. It
| includes people you'll never even hear from.
|
| For me, the big question I ask is basically "What are the
| chances this software becomes unavailable in the future and
| what's my escape plan?" These two weigh against each other --
| if it's a non-critical tool and the plan is "go back to doing
| it the old way, with near zero business impact" then I don't
| really care about the chances it disappears a whole lot. If
| it's "Start a several-months migration effort while the
| business is crippled" then suddenly that first bit becomes
| incredibly important.
|
| I consider chances a small (especially one-person) company
| disappears is fairly high. Same for a VC-funded startup (along
| with the chances they kill or pivot away from the product,
| which is effectively the same thing).
|
| Open source means it never really becomes "unavailable": It
| might be costly (eg if I have to fund maintenance on my own)
| but it still provides low risk of crippling my business.
|
| When I'm considering new software, the non-OSS stuff run by
| small companies just naturally goes to the bottom of the list
| for exactly this reason. If I go with something higher up on
| that list, that company won't even know they were being
| considered, let alone why I didn't pick them.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| No.
|
| You sell additional premium extension to provide needed left out
| of the open-source offering.
|
| You sell cloud hosting and on prem hosting.
|
| There is nothing at all wrong with that. That you have built a
| business where you make a living from software you wrote is
| awesome. I wish I could.
| [deleted]
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Given that the main software is AGPL, the extensions would also
| be open source.
| [deleted]
| nemiah wrote:
| Yes, the extensions are AGPL also.
| clarkevans wrote:
| > Given that the main software is AGPL, the extensions would
| also be open source.
|
| This is not necessarily true. If you are the sole copyright
| owner, you can have your main product be AGPL and sell
| proprietary extensions; there's no reason why you need to
| enforce your copyright against yourself. Alternatively, your
| combined product could be under a proprietary license that is
| not the AGPL.
| NoThisIsMe wrote:
| Yes.
|
| It's right there in bold: the customer is provided with the
| source code of the extension when they purchase it. So long as
| the user is free to study, modify, and distribute this source
| code, then it's FOSS.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Maybe it's just because the interface is a shop? Or because
| the extensions are automatically packaged.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > You sell additional premium extension
|
| ...which are open source.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Potential next episode: someone is taking advantage of my open
| source software, it's getting harder to sell it and earn a
| living.
| Avshalom wrote:
| She doesn't mention when it started paying her all her bills
| exactly but the cloud version started in 2013 and the CD from
| 2010 so presumably it's been her full time living for at least
| most of a decade. Even if it all comes apart tomorrow that's
| still a pretty good run for any single product/sole proprietor-
| ish small business.
| nemiah wrote:
| I don't see that happening. They would have to offer support
| for the new product and most of my marketing is word of mouth
| nowadays. Should work out just fine ;)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| The software is licensed under the AGPL. So, that would be an
| interesting article to see if someone was taking the code and
| repackaging it.
| leovailati wrote:
| Just wondering here, is there any way to protect oneself from
| that type of situation while at the same time keeping the
| source code open? Obviously, the name and logo are trademarked,
| but a third party could rebrand the program while using the
| same underlying source code.
| la_fayette wrote:
| The advanced features seem to be a good protection. Also the
| cost ist quite low, if you competing in the same market could
| you offer the service cheaper? I guess not. Moreover it is
| critical software for small businesses, I think many would
| pay for long term support on the original software...
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Open source == no protection. You rely on the morals of your
| customers. At any time somebody bigger than you can take your
| free source, modify it, make it better because they have
| already a base and sell it as closed proprietary software and
| you can't do anything about it.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > sell it as closed proprietary software
|
| This is not true for all open source licenses. Copyleft
| licenses such as the GPL and its variants prevent this.
|
| Someone can distribute your software instead of you and
| thereby lock you out of any profits there, especially if
| they undercut your price (in the limit case they can
| distribute your paid software for free), but certain open
| source licenses prevent retroactive locking as proprietary
| software.
| bityard wrote:
| Yes, it's called the GPL:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
|
| Under the GPL, a competitor can certainly take the code,
| rebrand it, and sell it as their own but they are required to
| provide the full source code of whatever "borrowed" GPL code
| they distribute to the end user. This ensures that the source
| (and whatever changes/additions are made) cannot be taken and
| locked up by someone else, which is possible with more
| permissive licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.
| clcaev wrote:
| [revision] In the comments section, following the article, she
| notes the extensions are open source, distributed when purchased.
| The license used for these extensions is not specified.
|
| Thank you for pronoun correction.
| lemarchr wrote:
| > It made me the the confident woman I am today ...
|
| > nemiah posted to Indie Women on March 5, 2021
| jpetso wrote:
| Quoting the author from the comments:
|
| > Yes, the plugins are open source, too. Customers can test
| what they will get in an online demo which is available on my
| website.
|
| > They get the functionality as well as the code after they
| bought the extension in my shop.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This is a bit confusing to me. They sell the plugins, but
| also the plugins are licensed that a customer can
| redistribute them to other customers legally?
|
| At first it sounded like 'open core' with the plugins not
| being open source, but if the plugins are open source too...
| I guess people pay for them, priced modestly, just for the
| convenience and support?
| everybodyknows wrote:
| >convenience and support
|
| Also initial access, and updates. Extensions are not
| mentioned on the free download page ...
|
| https://www.open3a.de/page-Download
|
| ... rather, pay-per-download:
|
| >If someone wants advanced features, I have a shop! In my
| shop the users can buy many of the extensions I have
| developed over the years. The prices are reasonable and
| start at 20EUR (~$24) up to around 80EUR (~$96) or so. The
| price contains updates for this extension for one year
| which means the next two versions.
|
| https://www.open3a.de/page-Plugins
|
| Apparently German businesses aren't much interested in
| running bootleg copies of modestly-priced a la carte
| extensions.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Yep, that makes sense, except as far as semantics, there
| would be nothing "bootleg" about it -- if they are
| licensed AGPL, that means anyone who gets it has a
| license to redistribute it to others under the same
| license, all totally above the board and legal. Right?
| That's something the AGPL license, that the author has
| chosen, gives you the right to do.
|
| I think this kind of mismatch stays under the radar when
| the stakes are pretty low, they probably aren't making
| tons of money off of this. If they were, someone else
| might try to get into the game. And if the pricing of the
| extension was a lot higher, more would probably use it
| (entirely legally) without paying.
| hideo7746 wrote:
| *she
| tasogare wrote:
| *she as someone who read the full article would notice.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| You actually read the articles on HN, and don't just form an
| opinion and write a comment after reading the headline alone?
| Pha, blasphemy.
|
| EDIT: I forgot that I'm not on Reddit, sorry. I will stop
| making jokes.
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