[HN Gopher] Placemark is going open source and shutting down
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Placemark is going open source and shutting down
Author : Tomte
Score : 489 points
Date : 2023-11-13 14:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (macwright.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (macwright.com)
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Thank you for committing to release it all as open source,
| instead of hoarding it or putting it in the bin like so many
| other services do when they fail to achieve sustainability.
| wslh wrote:
| Since major of startups fail, isn't it a good idea for a
| startup to commit to this at the beginning? Even privately to
| not disalign the success goal. If they don't commit to this it
| is zillion times worst than technical debt.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Colin Percival's Tarsnap famously has such mechanic (though
| not a startup). It ensures you wouldn't fall into some kind
| of bus problem. However, it creates an incentive where the
| general public has an incentive to see the product fail. I
| word it like that because from my PoV the general public has
| a net benefit from F(L)OSS. I suppose that is why people
| prefer to keep such secret.
|
| But hopefully not before it is too late. We should all think
| about situations where we are no longer around. Like having
| your keys/passwords at a notary.
| thfuran wrote:
| >I word it like that because from my PoV the general public
| has a net benefit from F(L)OSS.
|
| I'm not so sure about that. An actively developed/supported
| project is often more useful than an abandoned open source
| one.
| kawhah wrote:
| If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to
| maintain something you should always be able to find
| someone willing to accept market rate (by definition).
| This separates the cost of maintenance from costs flowing
| from rent-seeking behavior.
|
| Arguably industry is always willing to pay, in aggregate,
| the cost for free software to be maintained, but is not
| willing to pay, despite the optimism of those who sell
| it, for the marginal utility it gives them per-customer
| (which should be much higher). When asked to do so they
| will simply support free-as-in-beer or cheaper
| alternatives until one of those becomes the dominant
| player. This is why successful and heavily commercialized
| free software projects often seem to be only just
| clinging on to profitability (eg Docker).
| thfuran wrote:
| >If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to
| maintain something you should always be able to find
| someone willing to accept market rate (by definition).
|
| Are you saying that if you can pay someone to develop
| their proprietary code for a price you can necessarily
| find someone to accept the same amount of money for the
| same work but open sourced? That doesn't seem true. Those
| are not equivalent offers.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| Your comment sounds like you think open-source work would
| be _more_ expensive than closed-source work, or did I
| misunderstand? That would seem surprising to me.
|
| I would assume some people (clearly a minority) would be
| willing to take a small pay cut when working on FLOSS.
|
| E.G. could someone be paid slightly less at GitLab versus
| the same role at GitHub, if they believe in GitLab's
| principles
| thfuran wrote:
| There are people who value open source and there are
| people who value assets. The point is that there isn't a
| single market rate for the two offers since they aren't
| the same thing.
| kawhah wrote:
| No, I am saying that if a project is open sourced, and
| there is sufficient demand from people willing to pay for
| support, maintenance, etc, someone will come along to
| meet that demand.
|
| If there isn't then the original commercial company was
| obviously never viable either.
|
| Since an entity getting payment for maintenance can
| neither expect to collect a monopoly rent for the code,
| nor is required to pay one to anyone else, the cost of
| maintenance becomes the market price.
| smeyer wrote:
| I think your view is too strongly assuming that everyone
| in the market is perfectly rational and perfectly
| replaceable with zero transaction costs..
|
| Especially when you start talking about a single person
| company, it could be as simple as the founder being
| sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it
| despite making less than they could with other
| opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder
| gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to
| take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be
| barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if
| there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the
| process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a
| bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring
| in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the
| market fails to find someone to run the company.
| schnable wrote:
| If the code is open sourced, there doesn't need to be a
| dedicated company behind supporting it. Assuming a
| compatible license, any party that wants to use can fork
| it and pay people to maintain it for their own needs
| without advertising that they "support" the code.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| But just because something is open source doesn't mean
| it's easily maintainable by anyone. It's one thing to
| install and run it somewhere, but if it needs fixes or
| customization it quickly becomes necessary to learn and
| understand the architecture and organization of the code,
| the data models and structures, etc. and if it was
| previously the product of a "one man shop" then you're
| going to have to pay someone to do that learning.
| rglullis wrote:
| Some products are viable as opensource projects but not
| as a commercial venture, and the overhead of a business
| entity might be enough to get out of viability.
| e12e wrote:
| > However, it creates an incentive where the general public
| has an incentive to see the product fail.
|
| Maybe Colin should make tarsnap free for bus drivers? ;)
| toyg wrote:
| _> However, it creates an incentive where the general
| public has an incentive to see the product fail_
|
| That's not really the problem. The problem is that it
| lowers the company value: why should I, potential acquirer,
| shell out $$$ to get your IP, when I can just sit down and
| wait for it to come down the river?
| concordDance wrote:
| Most of the value of a company is in the people,
| structure and brand.
|
| And there's no guarantee the other acquirers will
| cooperate. "Why should I wait for the company to collapse
| and open source it's stuff forcing me to compete with
| other acquirers when I can buy them now and get a
| monopoly?"
| actionablefiber wrote:
| Presumably if the technology is good, there is some
| competitive advantage in retaining sole control over it,
| or licensing it out.
| abirch wrote:
| This seems to make the company more valuable toward the
| end of life. If you don't buy out your competitor, your
| customers will have an Open Source alternative.
| narinxas wrote:
| it depends, many startups whole purpose for getting founded
| is getting acquihired, if this the case, then clearly the
| answer is no
| dyeje wrote:
| It's a lot of work to set something up for being a
| sustainable, usable OSS project. It certainly doesn't make
| sense to invest time in it upfront when your goal is to sell
| access to it. Afterwards, founders have usually poured
| everything they have into trying to make the business survive
| and the work is just unappealing.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps, but many startups do leverage paid products and
| components, leaving the open-source product nonfunctional
| (without a user paying those same licenses). To suggest that
| the company has an obligation to only use OSS is not
| reasonable.
| jojobas wrote:
| What's the incentive? Startups are created to earn founders
| money, at least in the form of wages off funding or ideally
| when acquired/listed. Pledging to open source doesn't work
| towards that goal.
| remram wrote:
| A commitment is probably not worth much when the entity who
| committed literally doesn't exist anymore.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > isn't it a good idea for a startup to commit to this at the
| beginning?
|
| The source code is part of a startup's IP. When a startup
| fails the IP goes to the investors and debtors who can try to
| recoup some of their investment by selling the IP.
|
| By the time a company fails, the source code isn't really
| theirs to give away any more. They have to hand it over to
| investors. It's the same reason a failing startup can't just
| give away all of their office furniture or other assets.
|
| Even if we ignore that, releasing source code doesn't
| actually do anything for most customers of a SaaS platform.
| They were paying for the service, not the source code. The
| source code wasn't designed for individual use, so self-
| hosting isn't going to make sense. Maybe some other group
| would try to run a company around it, but if the first
| company failed to become sustainable with the source code
| it's less likely that a second company would.
| stared wrote:
| "Just open source it" is not always a viable option. IP can be
| locked for one or the other reason, and it is not always in the
| power of founders to release it.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| PSA - the HN article submitter ("Tomte") is not Placemark's
| author (Tom MacWright) despite the three matching letters.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Tom M seems to not like HN, so this makes sense.
|
| https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| He does have an account here, tho, and is responding to
| comments.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tmcw
| thewarpaint wrote:
| Either the snippet has a bug, or he changed his mind and
| removed it, but it's not working.
| aseipp wrote:
| Hacker News puts `noreferrer` on the link (because
| apparently Internet Points and Arguments are more
| important than the courtesy of respecting the wishes of
| the author.)
| Modified3019 wrote:
| >I've learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added
| Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would
| take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and
| comments that were fun but would make articles less
| focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on
| everything I wrote, regardless of what it was.
|
| >Writing for the Hacker News audience makes my writing
| worse.
|
| Yeah, understandable.
| dudul wrote:
| OTOH this whole "I didn't value your service enough to pay for
| it, but now that you failed and open sourced it I'll jump on
| it" attitude is kind of annoying.
|
| I can absolutely understand startup founders who are a bit
| spiteful and don't want to give away for free what nobody was
| interested in buying from them.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It's better for your mental health to instead think "well, at
| least my loyal, paying customers who believed in me have a
| path".
| dudul wrote:
| True, that's a good counter point. I'll take it :)
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps another option would be to give paying customers an
| invitation to a private git repo
| andybak wrote:
| Maybe the pricing is off?
|
| There's lots of things I'd use at $n but wouldn't use at $10n
|
| And the corollary of this - if open source didn't exist, the
| result wouldn't be me paying for lots more products - it
| would be using lots less products.
|
| Certainly - the advent of paywalls has meant that I mainly
| don't read those sources. Even the more affordable ones come
| with a mental tax of deciding to subscribe/cancel,
| remembering to renew/cancel etc...
| cableshaft wrote:
| The first time I've heard of it is today so I can't really
| have ever given them money to begin with.
|
| But I'd be curious to see the source once it's released, for
| sure.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Open source code is inherently more dependable than
| proprietary code, in that if the maintainer quits and this
| tool is crucial for your business, if it's open source you
| can maintain it yourself (or if it's used by multiple
| parties, they can pool together to keep maintaining it)
|
| I myself am not interested on any proprietary offerings at
| this point; this has no relation to any qualities of the
| proprietary product. It could be awesome for all I know
| senderista wrote:
| How many open-sourced codebases from failed startups have
| succeeded as open-source projects? Can you name a single one?
| Wolfbeta wrote:
| Blender
| l0b0 wrote:
| Netscape Navigator, which became Mozilla, which became
| Firefox.
| hnbad wrote:
| That's not entirely honest. Mozilla basically was an
| unfinished rewrite, not the original Netscape Navigator,
| and it was spun out into a foundation during the
| acquisition. Netscape didn't simply go bankrupt throw its
| source code into the void for someone to pick it up.
| miohtama wrote:
| OpenOffice
| tantalic wrote:
| Parse (https://parseplatform.org)
| prerok wrote:
| Would Godot count?
| timeon wrote:
| It looks like nice tool. Shame it didn't work out in the end.
| sccxy wrote:
| macwright.com domain redirects to google.com for me.
|
| Better source: https://www.placemark.io/post/placemark-is-
| winding-down
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Because of this script tag.... <script>try {
| if (document.referrer) { const ref = new
| URL(document.referrer); if (ref.host ===
| 'news.ycombinator.com') { window.location.href =
| 'https://google.com/'; } } }
| catch (e) { } </script>
| maccard wrote:
| https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news - seems
| intentional
| loceng wrote:
| Might be better he redirect to that post specifically but
| it might defeat the purpose:
|
| It seems to be a filter curate out those who aren't
| interested or curious enough or able to problem solve why
| that redirect happened, and how to circumvent it - a low
| bar but could filter out a lot of noise.
| emi2k01 wrote:
| That's interesting. I think I read about this website
| redirecting HN users before.
|
| I can't trigger that redirect on Firefox or Chromium
| browsers, though. It seems HN puts a `noreferrer` on the
| link.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Nope, works here on FF.
| nottorp wrote:
| Doesn't work on my Firefox either. Brought me to the real
| site. I do have all privacy options on, and ublock Origin.
| So maybe something just deleted the referrer. Or it got
| deleted because it points to google (I have google
| container on).
| panopticon wrote:
| The `rel="noreferrer"` attribute on the link instructs
| the browser to omit the Referer header on the request. So
| any browser that respects that option shouldn't be
| impacted by that code.
| trollied wrote:
| Pricing seems strange. $20/user per month. But you'd need someone
| else to also pay so that you can collaborate. So $40/month
| minimum? Seems quite a barrier.
| reidrac wrote:
| It is a very specialised GIS tool, isnt it? So that price
| doesn't look like a barrier to me. Sounds more like a smaller
| market with already established tools, perhaps?
|
| I haven't checked if it was the case, but organisation type of
| license with a pack of users could have worked well.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Maybe, or you end up with "yeah, the placemark login details
| are in the shared password vault"
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| right, and then some time in the future the algorithm
| determines hey these people are obviously sharing the
| login, and they are totally hooked now!
|
| The first year's supply of hits isn't free, but it's pretty
| cheap if you cheat a bit, and you figure since you're
| cheating a bit it will be cheap forever so why not get
| hooked!?
|
| I'm not saying it's bad, just I've worked at some places
| that do this and you know the company they are doing it to
| know they're doing it, but accepting it at the moment.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" It is a very specialised GIS tool, isnt it?"_
|
| I wouldn't call it very specialised. Seems like a fairly
| general tool for visualising and manipulating GeoJSON and
| similar data? I actually need to create/manipulate a GeoJSON
| data set myself for a current project, so I think I'll try
| this out!
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| Building a business around a software is no simple task. You need
| a lot of 20$ customer to make a leaving and despite the low
| marginal cost for a user, it's very hard to make people to open
| their wallet to buy software whereas those same people will go
| buy expensive servers all the time and won't blink an eye for
| hardware.
|
| Any chance you could give more info on the size of enterprise
| customer you were looking at? I've had many people coming to me
| and only very rarely the rate per hour once you consider
| everything is more interesting than getting a 9to5 anywhere else.
|
| source: 20% of my income come from sales that relates to my OSS
| software and I hope one day to get to 100% so I can focus 100% of
| my time on it
| figassis wrote:
| I'm one of the users that is averse to paying even a $10
| subscription. The reason is it would be one of the 10-20
| subscriptions that are all supposed to be really useful and
| worth it. For a small startup, this adds up, especially the
| $10/user one, where now you have to consider all your
| subscriptions when checking if you have the budget to hire
| someone new. I with there was a service where I could define a
| budget, say $500-$1000/month, and pick the services I need from
| those available on the platform, specify the size of my team,
| and vendors would bid for this. This service could then provide
| some form of SSO to these services. You might not get $20/user,
| but you might get 5%-10% of all the users on this service.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| So how much would you be willing to pay for that service?
| komadori wrote:
| Well that service probably could charge $20 per user off
| the top because there would only be one of them :-).
| worksonmine wrote:
| Percentage of the total budget obviously. I'd like the same
| but for streaming, I don't watch enough to keep a monthly
| subscription on all the services. And hopping is getting
| tedious. Give me one place where I can watch anything
| wholesale, and the networks/services bidding for a cut of
| my subscription. If it works for music why not TV?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| One reason is that the risk of investing in creating
| video media is orders of magnitude higher than audio
| media, due to the costs being orders of magnitude higher.
|
| >And hopping is getting tedious.
|
| I think life is pretty good if all I have to do is set a
| reminder to click a few buttons.
| figassis wrote:
| They'd take a fee from vendors.
| dustingetz wrote:
| a saas is three orders of magnitudes cheaper than a human, in
| terms of %runway your entire saas budget is like 5 days per
| year of runway for a 4 person startup. That developer you
| just hired doesn't work out? boom in one instant you're out
| $50k plus the cumulative time anyone spent spent talking to
| them. companies will spend huge amounts of money on saas just
| to get leverage on their 100x higher payroll costs.
| type0 wrote:
| Another problem is that there no way of safeguarding that
| your SaaS provider won't raise your prices overnight, and
| migration also costs money and time
| fragmede wrote:
| Multi-year business contracts have lengthy renewal
| negotiations. Your saas provider can change rates, but it
| won't be overnight if you're a business.
| figassis wrote:
| US VC backed startup colored glasses: multiyear SaaS
| contracts. Some people are bootstrapping. And I thought
| the appeal of SaaS is pay for what you use, and pay as
| you grow? So now the selling point is buy in bulk?
| otteromkram wrote:
| The selling point is to buy what works for you.
|
| If you know what size user base you have and can estimate
| usage, buying ahead of time makes sense.
|
| If you're smaller or can't afford a multi-year contract
| or don't want to get locked into one service, then "pay
| as you go" makes sense.
| dustingetz wrote:
| people renegotiate compensation too; knowledge transfer is
| measured in months to years of salary
|
| Mythical Man Month lays it out crystal clear that you want
| the smallest team possible, levered up to the hilt and
| retained long term, because communication overhead between
| people and teams is the dominant cost factor in orgs of all
| sizes. The optimal team size is two, given sufficient
| leverage. SaaS is the leverage.
| Closi wrote:
| If you aren't willing to pay $10 a month for this, frankly
| you aren't the customer.
|
| I'm in a small business that pays much more per person for
| mapping software :)
|
| (10 person team, probably PS8k per year spend)
| Terretta wrote:
| Vast majority of subscription pricing is far out of line to
| software/SaaS cost (not counting venture costs), so apps and
| web apps have to compete on things other than utility.
|
| You mention a $20 customer. Look at pricing of Google
| workspaces or Office.
|
| https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...
|
| Version pricing was beneficial to indie builders because users
| didn't consider the source. (Office still offers that $149
| level version pricing.)
|
| Subscription pricing indies try to charge more, often
| multiples, relative to enterprise incumbents, so anyone who can
| ship at scale, can make the market unfeasible for indie
| entrants.
|
| What happens is boutique buyers of indie subs, but not the mass
| market scale because it's too much to get _all the_ users.
| runako wrote:
| > Look at pricing of Google workspaces or Office.
|
| This is a common mistake in understanding pricing. The reason
| Office (or consumer apps like Spotify & Netflix) are able to
| be relatively cheaper is because their addressable market is
| vastly larger. Larger markets support lower prices, where the
| winners still end up earning more revenue.
|
| By contrast, smaller niche markets have fewer potential
| customers over which to amortize their wares. This means that
| all things equal, those applications will tend to cost more.
|
| As a reductio thought experiment, consider that anyone can
| buy Microsoft's newest OS, the product of many tens of
| billions of dollars of R&D, for less than the cost of a
| tailored suit. But suppose you needed to buy an OS that would
| only ever run on 50 devices worldwide, how much do you think
| that would cost?
| Terretta wrote:
| And yet, your theory is clearly falsified when priced as a
| one time sale. The larger companies' software costs more,
| across the board.
|
| Your explanation ought to be true either way, but it isn't.
|
| And it doesn't have to be a thought experiment, there
| remains just enough single purchase software around to
| check.
|
| That's because except for "artisanal", "boutique", or
| "Veblen" products, the user doesn't care about your costs,
| they care about their utility (and for Veblen, the cost
| _is_ its utility).
|
| Goes back to my initial comment: there are a misleading
| number of buyers willing to pay too much to "support the
| artist", as I do in software. But that is a very small
| addressable market relative to those who will pay for their
| utility, but not for your failure to scale.
| runako wrote:
| > And yet, your theory is clearly falsified when priced
| as a one time sale.
|
| I don't understand what you're saying here. Could you
| provide some examples?
|
| Also I should have added the caveat that I'm talking
| about _sustainable_ pricing models.
|
| Yes, there are lots of small companies that don't yet
| understand how much they need to charge in order to
| thrive long-term. Those are not great counter-examples,
| because they represent a creator subsidizing her
| customers. That can only last so long.
| dim13 wrote:
| Another application you discover from reading necrolog.
| hiatus wrote:
| What is necrolog, a blog for dead SaaS?
| bravura wrote:
| What's that?
| solarkraft wrote:
| Thank you, that looks good!
|
| While I appreciate them releasing their stuff at all, why do
| companies usually also shut down at the same time as they are
| gaining a really cool differentiator over their competitors?
| vikramkr wrote:
| Is that actually a thing? I don't think I've heard of a pattern
| like that
| kristopolous wrote:
| Because people are more willing to be take audacious risks
| when things look like they will inevitably fail. It gives a
| sense of freedom to a project.
|
| Giving up is the first step to success. That's when you stop
| trying and start doing.
| vikramkr wrote:
| That's an interesting mechanism. If you know if there are
| any numbers on how often that happens?
| perlgeek wrote:
| I guess the reasoning goes:
|
| * I can't make enough money out of it
|
| * do I keep this as a side project?
|
| * if yes: development mostly stops
|
| * if no: OK, shut down
|
| * now that I don't fear competition, I can Open Source it
|
| (not commenting on how valid each of these is, which is
| probably very hard to judge without the founder's perspective).
| notpushkin wrote:
| I love the Chatwoot success story:
|
| > [Chatwoot] was a product we started building in 2017. It
| failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. [...] It was in an
| inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we
| thought of putting it out instead of letting the code to rust.
| Our idea is to make it something like Gitlab/Mattermost where
| people can host their own version and we will provide a hosted
| version for people who don't want to self-host.
|
| > After we open-sourced, we received contributions from 30
| developers all around the world.
|
| And then they proceeded to raise $1.6 million in seed round.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139
| moklick wrote:
| Such a great product! I am sorry that it didn't work out and
| thanks for open sourcing it!
| 0xferruccio wrote:
| Val (https://val.town), the new project you're working on is
| super cool!
|
| Been playing around with it for the last couple of months and
| have been delighted with it :)
| ushakov wrote:
| Tells more about the founders than the product itself!
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Looks a bit too ambitious. Was it really necessary to provide
| collaborative real-time editing? This feature seems way over the
| top.
|
| I understand every startup wants to have a killer feature which
| creates unique selling proposition, but this seems like something
| that probably took way too much effort and wasn't really
| demanded. But this is only my assumption.
| TkTech wrote:
| Collaborative UXs are much easier to "get right" then they used
| to be. There are a great many libraries to help like yjs. We
| added it to a prosemirror based block editor, including polish
| like multiple cursors and fun things like that, in less than a
| week.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks for the insight.
| tmcw wrote:
| That's a fair assumption. There were some customers who
| benefited from real-time editing, but it was a big tech bet and
| led to a design that was harder to scale for larger datasets.
| traverseda wrote:
| My only note is that it would be nice if it was open sourced
| before the servers shut down, so that if there were any users who
| were dependent on it they have time to make a transition.
|
| Still, releasing it is already much better than 98% of companies
| in this space, and I'd definitely be inclined to use other
| products by this person because of it.
| xiaq wrote:
| The concern may be that there could be undiscovered
| vulnerabilities in the service and releasing the source before
| shutdown could make it easier for malicious actors to discover
| those vulnerabilities and compromise user data.
| tmcw wrote:
| Yes, that's the rationale. A customer has asked about getting
| access to the source ahead of time and I'll try to make that
| work.
| orblivion wrote:
| Given your setup would it be easy to make a data
| exporter/importer? That way you could give them the data
| and shut down before opening the source.
| tmcw wrote:
| Placemark was built around that idea - all the data is
| easily exportable & importable in many open formats. It
| should be straightforward to move to the open source
| version or other tools.
| bdcravens wrote:
| As I mentioned in another comment, perhaps you could invite
| current users to a private repo, and then make it public at
| the business EOL.
| loceng wrote:
| Fair point. Perhaps if it's such an issue for someone, and they
| see this news, then they can reach out to Tom to try to remedy
| it - and perhaps help him test out the open source provided to
| make sure everything's peachy?
|
| He seems like the type of guy to be willing to reasonable and
| considerate like this.
| chrisdinn wrote:
| I've used Placemark for well over a year to build custom map-
| based graphics for torontoverse.com. There are a lot of web apps
| in this space now, and always QGIS, but I personally felt
| Placemark struck the right balance between simplicity and power.
|
| Thanks for building it!
| tristramg wrote:
| Oh, that's sad. Placemark was a very nice as it was for
| collecting geographical objects where the associated data is well
| structured. This is always a hurdle when integrating the
| generated data into other systems.
|
| My coop has been working with something resembling to placemark:
| https://cocarto.com but our business model is not to sell it as a
| SaaS (which is always very difficult, and requires a lot of
| capital to reach enough customers) but sell a service to
| companies and administration around it. That's why it's FOSS from
| the beginning.
| type0 wrote:
| > but sell a service to companies and administration around it.
| That's why it's FOSS from the beginning.
|
| This doesn't work for everyone, some startups can't afford to
| put two thirds of the resources on providing support. I think
| it's sad that there usually no middle way to structure your
| business with FOSS in mind.
| tristramg wrote:
| I agree. That's our choice, mostly because of our background
| as service provider (we usually charge by time) it's in our
| comfort zone while we are uncomfortable in marketing and
| trying to get 1000 recurring paying customers. Everyone is
| different.
|
| And yes, I'm frustrated that living from doing FOSS is hard.
| And it is also hard to spend only 1 day/week to do smaller
| contributions...
| type0 wrote:
| Small companies are often happy with a free tier of a service
| provided by big corporations. This perverse gatekeeping makes it
| hard for newcomer startups to compete and just get their foot in
| a door.
| worksonmine wrote:
| It also allows newcomer startups to exploit the free tier and
| create a business with only time investment.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| I didn't know about the app but this is a great shutdown post.
| Clear and to the point, no corporate bs around failure to
| monetize (the dreaded "macroeconomic environment", a reasonable
| period of transition for customers as well as a price discount
| (free!), and obviously last but not least open-sourcing.
|
| It is the kind of post that would make me trust the founder to
| become a customer of their next project.
| reddalo wrote:
| I think he should try selling it to Google. It would nicely
| integrate in their suite of Docs + Sheets + My Maps.
| client4 wrote:
| Placemark was such a great map editor in a collaborative
| environment. Sad to see it shut down.
| oooyay wrote:
| Can someone shed some light on what happens monetarily to
| bootstrapped company founders? How many of them are offering
| personal collateral on loans vs some form of angel investing? I'm
| finding it hard to square open sourcing something if someone just
| lost decades of savings or the value in their home, so I'm
| curious if there's some way they're getting funding for their
| companies that doesn't ruin them if things like this happen. The
| tone is also very, "I lost dreams but not my livelihood" in many
| of these statements and I'm curious how.
| bdon wrote:
| Common situations for founders who describe themselves as
| bootstrapped:
|
| - doing consulting work on the side
|
| - living off savings
|
| - having a spouse with income
|
| For bootstrapped companies in the software or SaaS space
| without employees there should be minimal start-up costs
| compared to say, opening a restaurant. The real loss is
| opportunity costs: what salary or equity you could have earned
| as an alternative.
| tmcw wrote:
| I did consulting for the first 8 months of development, and
| then the company roughly broke even for operational costs since
| day one. I built most things myself which led to lower costs.
| My main cost was just rent and health insurance, which in
| America, self-employed, is both expensive and useless. I had
| savings from working for a decade in tech and minimized other
| costs. So, lucky position to be in, but also your average
| startup's monthly burn is enormous compared to what you can do
| by being scrappy.
| qrohlf wrote:
| For anyone else who follows along in this domain, there's an
| interesting competitor in the space I stumbled across recently:
| https://felt.com/
|
| Pretty nice looking product and robust feature set. Love to see
| GIS tooling becoming more accessible.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I am going to a GIS conference and I saw Felt on the list of
| sessions. Didn't know what it was until now.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Great! I'm sorry it didn't work out!
| Shorn wrote:
| I wonder how long before a company does this; then the software
| gains traction because it's open and free, so they re-incorporate
| and re-license the software.
|
| Or have I not been paying enough attention, and this already
| happened?
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