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Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

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Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#91

Post by lelanthran »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #28
la64710 wrote: post #25

What is the reason for “open sourcing” this , when any meaningful implementation is locked away behind services and is closed source. I just think these kind of use cases confuses users. There is no problem in being closed source and proprietary (unless you are using preexisting open source code and open sourcing those parts of your code makes it legally compliant) . In any case it is confusing at best and misleading…

Free advertising on Haker News. 10 bucks net profit without any grows is also profitable. Getting to the main page of HN was worth open sourcing what had no potential anyway. This is my reasoning, I'm not the creator of this.

I think maybe you're being overly cynical (yes yes, I did see your username!)

Sometimes, large companies open-source a SaaS product because they expect to make more money from the free marketing (See yesterdays post about headline-driven development) even though their implementation remains closed.

We still give them news-space, don't we? Why should we act any differently for solo developers?

Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#92

Post by tomfreemax »

Looks really cool and could be a good alternative to Typeform.

In our organization, due to privacy reasons we need to self host.

You might want to look at something like the plus plan photoprism has. For photoprism, if you want a UI for user admin, you pay something. One can do the same thing from cli, but in corporate environments it's easier for me to say, look, we need to pay, because we need this admin interface. If I would self host but want to support you otherwise, it's hard to argue why the organization should "donate" money.

Hope it makes sense. Best wishes!

Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#94

Post by jdaviescoates »

jdaviescoates wrote: post #93

I currently use NocoDB for forms, which works great, but this looks great too, many thanks for sharing!

@dearroy in fact, it'd be great if you integrated with NocoDB! I was a little disappointed to see that at present you mostly only integrate with proprietary tools and not with other self-hostable tools.

Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#95

Post by flavaz »

jraph wrote: post #84
flavaz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limesurvey is “good enough” for most applications and is open source- any reason why that wouldn’t work for your use case?

As far as I know, LimeSurvey can't auto update a spreadsheet with the answers. But LimeSurvey has its advantages: - it's in PHP, and our whole infra is already using it (WordPress and Nextcloud). So it's easier to setup and if we want bridges between these tools, it'll be easier. - AFAIR, it doesn't require JS when filling a form and in particular, it's not a React app. We have used LimeSurvey in the past, we got rid…

Reason why I ask is that there are many form/survey builders out there, as people often underestimate the complexity it takes to set one up that supports things like max diff, routing etc.

Looking at the forums I can see that some have managed to achieve what you need via plugins (albeit the one I see that is confirmed working seems to be paid…)

Just thinking contributing an open source plugin to a great open source scripting tool would save you headaches down the road :)

Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#96

Post by thih9 »

chii wrote: post #80
thih9 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific? In what ways exactly it is more dangerous than other open source licenses in this case?

> more dangerous only if you intend to produce a derivative work for which you intend to sell, and thus do not want to reveal said derivative to others. AGPL is the best license available for open source imho.

That was my understanding too, I don’t understand how this would be seen as dangerous in this context, I’d also view it as a benefit.

Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#97

Post by dearroy »

jdaviescoates wrote: post #94
jdaviescoates wrote: post #93

I currently use NocoDB for forms, which works great, but this looks great too, many thanks for sharing!

@dearroy in fact, it'd be great if you integrated with NocoDB! I was a little disappointed to see that at present you mostly only integrate with proprietary tools and not with other self-hostable tools.

You request it, we make it!

Please open an issue and let's discuss it further. With any luck, we can make it available in just a few weeks.

Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#98

Post by dearroy »

gus_massa wrote: post #11
dearroy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's to tap into global collaboration for faster innovation, and ensure transparency and trust. Thanks for bringing up the good question!

Do you have another source of income? If someone just use it without giving you money or code contributions, would you feel ok?

Both of us work part-time on HeyForm and are satisfied with the revenue it generates.

However, who wouldn't want to earn more? :D

Re: Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced

#100

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #55
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NestJS is nodeJS for Java people. It's like Angular in that sense. So some people will feel like it's over engineered. I mean it's overengineered. Why do I have to register all these things, and why does it keep crashing if I register it like this without any understandable error message. It has a little bit of an OCD relationship with dependency injection. Where the normal import system can handle most of those case…

Yeah, I don't know, most of the time only time you actually need dep injection is for tests, and at that point why not just mock with Jest? Feels too much just having to do all this work just to complicate dependencies and make moving around more difficult for tests when a much simpler solution is available.

Dependency injection was not really meant to help with testing, but to keep code decoupled. It can be a nice pattern, but even if nestjs forces us to do it, we developers still find creative ways to nullify any attempts to decouple the code we write :).
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