Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

umbrel.com

31–40 of 140 posts

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#31
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license forbids me to hire another vendor to service the product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in.

> The license forbids me to hire another vendor to service the product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in. Where in the license does it forbid such a thing? Commercial use != an individual paying for third party support/service/development.

I don't know what the intended definition of Commercial is, as it is not defined in the license, but the common definition is:

>> used for selling goods or providing services for money, rather than for personal use

(https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/commerci...)

An individual being paid to provide a service is commercial under that, and most legal definitions of the word.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#32
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not Open Source. It's a perfectly justifiable decision, but it's not Open Source, nor is it equivalent. Yes, your license means that individual users can make little patches to customize the product to their needs, and even share these customizations with other users. That's great! But the license effectively prohibits borrowing code from your codebase for use in other projects, meaning your code does not be…

Thanks for the insightful reply. Everything you said makes total sense. Re noncommercial organizations being permitted users, this was a conscious decision on our part. We're purposefully building Umbrel purely for consumers, and don't plan to serve any commercial or noncommercial organizations. We want to align our incentives directly with consumers instead of enterprises, and this is purely to help us focus on buil…

I see. Well, I hope you are able to succeed at that. For what it's worth, we initially focused on consumer use but weren't able to find a path to revenue there.

Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops.

I think the problem is that the apps, while functional, weren't competitive with their SaaS competitors, and so the only reason to use the hosting service was if you really cared about the Open Source aspect. Maybe if we had a killer app that was actually better than any SaaS alternative, we could have gotten somewhere? But we never found that.

Meanwhile, we got a lot of feedback from people working at big orgs that were forced to self-host for regulatory reasons. Such orgs are terribly served by the current software market, since they can essentially only buy software from companies that specialize in building regulated software, and those companies generally build software that is expensive and terrible.

Real-time collaboration essentially didn't exist in this market, making our apps actually better than what these organizations had! But we had absolutely no expertise in selling to orgs like this, and we never really figured it out. We should have hired for it much earlier, or maybe even brought on another co-founder with enterprise sales experience.

So, we were unable to get anywhere before investors pulled the plug.

With that said, I always say you should not trust anyone's advice. Your story is different and you need to do what makes intuitive sense to you. If your intuition is right, you succeed. But you certainly can't succeed by going against your own intuition, so if someone says something that doesn't make intuitive sense to you, ignore it.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#33
This is a service I'm interested in, but by fuck is their website annoying. Instead of having stupid moving rectangles of services you can run on Umbrel, why not just display each service as a paragraph of text, with an icon next to it? No animations, and no rectangles moving across the screen.

These people have put a good deal of effort into their landing screen, unfortunately this effort has made it worse than it would have been if it was simple text descriptions. Please improve this.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#34

This is a service I'm interested in, but by fuck is their website annoying. Instead of having stupid moving rectangles of services you can run on Umbrel, why not just display each service as a paragraph of text, with an icon next to it? No animations, and no rectangles moving across the screen. These people have put a good deal of effort into their landing screen, unfortunately this effort has made it worse than it w…

I agree, that's my least favorite part of the site as well. We'll update it with a browsable directory of all the available apps in our app store soon.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#35

This is a service I'm interested in, but by fuck is their website annoying. Instead of having stupid moving rectangles of services you can run on Umbrel, why not just display each service as a paragraph of text, with an icon next to it? No animations, and no rectangles moving across the screen. These people have put a good deal of effort into their landing screen, unfortunately this effort has made it worse than it w…

I agree, that's my least favorite part of the site as well. We'll update it with a browsable directory of all the available apps in our app store soon.

This would be really useful, as it would allow people to quickly highlight where they would find it useful for them.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#36
Love it! Private self hosting but made easy for the people (like me) who don't want to spend hours setting it all up and keeping it up to date! Also the design looks amazing, finally some open source project with an actual designer haha

Btw can't sign up for the newsletter although tried multiple emails and disabled adblocker. Just says "Oops! Something went wrong. Can you please try again?"...

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#37
post #22

At this point, any marketing copy using the word “beautiful” is a major turn-off for me.

Pretty sure I'm in the minority of HN folks, but I'm a fan of tools/OS'es/whatever that make a concerted effort to follow design trends and present a modern-looking UX.

To “follow design trends and present a modern-looking UX” is far from synonymous with “beautiful”, which in turn is very much in the eye of the beholder. The problem with “beautiful” is that it’s a manipulative fluff word which gives no information whatsoever about the product except that its marketing people seem to want the product to be perceived as beautiful. The other issue is its inflationary use. Every other product thinks it needs to add “beautiful” to its tag line.

Re: Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting

#40
post #22

At this point, any marketing copy using the word “beautiful” is a major turn-off for me.

Pretty sure I'm in the minority of HN folks, but I'm a fan of tools/OS'es/whatever that make a concerted effort to follow design trends and present a modern-looking UX.

I don't think it's a minority. It's just that those who dislike these trends are far more vocal than those who appreciate them.
Post reply on HN