On https://backgroundremoverai.com I put the utility into it's own pip and open source it https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover, and the web framework kept closed source.
Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could an individual of ill-repute freely download the source containing the EE and edit it to turn off checks for KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYFEN_MODE? Obviously you have license protection against them redistributing the modified version but would anything practical prevent them from running it themselves?
It'd be a violation of the license terms. Other than that, I may send Liam Neeson after them. :)
His very specific set of skills is hunting down license term violators
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#23I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…
Could an individual of ill-repute freely download the source containing the EE and edit it to turn off checks for KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYFEN_MODE? Obviously you have license protection against them redistributing the modified version but would anything practical prevent them from running it themselves?
Almost all software company revenues come from business customers who are too big to mess with stuff like this.
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#24I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…
We need more business owners like you. I’d never heard of your product (I’m not in an industry that would have one), just read your blog post on the license; I I wish you wild success and I hope more small dev shops will have the same courage and the same outcome. Cheers!
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#25As another data point, IBM WebSphere had an open-source version and a paid version which used AspectJ (AOP) to deploy proprietary features. People could deploy something like that potentially even at runtime via remote libraries and load-time weaving. (The technique was called product-line engineering.) Obviously Spring still does something similar with its AspectJ-derived AOP. It works mainly for features applied as…
> The technique was called product-line engineering.
Thank you for adding this bit of info! We’ve been using this model for a while but I hadn’t come across a label for it. Now knowing this, I’m coming across a ton of great info about managing/sustaining these product families.
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#26I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…
Could an individual of ill-repute freely download the source containing the EE and edit it to turn off checks for KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYFEN_MODE? Obviously you have license protection against them redistributing the modified version but would anything practical prevent them from running it themselves?
Yes, and most places that do this (e.g. OpenProject) don't have licenses preventing this, so I have deployed, and shimmed out the enterprise blockers, many Foss sass tools.
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#27I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…
Say if someone copied your codebase tomorrow, and rebranded it as a competing solution and started advertising on same places as you are, what do you do?
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#28I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…
How do you actually protect the CE users from setting the environment variables to activate premium features?
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#29My mental model for how we do it is the analogy of git/github: git is an open source project that is useful in its own right; github is the opinionated SaaS “glue” between git and an organization.
Our “git” is Plane[1], which is by design fairly unopinionated and general. Our “github” is Jamsocket[2], which is more opinionated about deployment, observability, etc.
We use the open source version of Plane in Jamsocket, and build on top of it in a separate (proprietary) codebase.
Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?
#30I watched an interview of Tom from GitHub recently with Indie.vc, and he spent a solid five minutes reiterating that you shouldn’t split your code bases.