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Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

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Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#251

Post by mattl »

pjmlp wrote: post #243
mattl wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want “Linux desktop software” to grow. I want computer users to have zero-proprietary software. The problem with thinking of GNU/Linux in the same way as Windows and Mac OS X is that it assumes a world where proprietary software is the norm, or is okay. I believe that is isn’t okay, and that it is harmful.

Harmful is wanting to be paid for their work while expecting others to give their work for free. It is plain impossible to live from selling desktop software with source code available, without having others in the first week come around and re-bundle it, Sourceforge style.

Most of the GNU/Linux desktop stuff is GNOME, and a lot of GNOME developers work at Red Hat, but not exclusively. If you want to work on free software desktop applications, I would consider working at a company like that.

A lot of desktop software is commodity stuff — mail clients, office suites, browsers, photo editing and the like. But there are some areas where we need to be better, such as video editing.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#252

Post by Fnoord »

brightball wrote: post #88
magduf wrote: post #72

The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…

Yep, totally agree with you there. After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP. Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem. As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General pu…

Isn't that also a matter of how you word / market it? If its marketed as an Exchange client also able to do IMAP/Gmail that's something different than an email client with IMAP/Gmail support oh and it has an Exchange plugin.

There's only a handful of Exchange clients for *NIX though, that I agree with.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#253

Post by toopsss »

mattl wrote: post #244
throwaway23948 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is telling people what is good for them, like you just did, not fundamentalism? Almost every server and smart phone install of Linux uses proprietary software, that is clearly part of how people wants to use it. You yourself are communicating through many layers of proprietary software right now. This is exactly why people don't want to do open source. Because increasingly it isn't about culture, doing it better…

I’m not telling people what is good for them. I’m describing the reasons for the creation of the GNU/Linux operating system. What proprietary software is being used on servers? I believe most Android users don’t know about user freedom, and those that do would greatly prefer a more generic, “pure” Android experience vs the poor quality applications installed by default on most non-Google phones. You’re confusing the…

> The GNU/Linux operating system was built long before open source was a thing.

Please find someone that worked in the field during the 70s. They hopefully will kindly re-educate you on this BS.

Also if you’re talking about the OSI of the late 90s I’d argue that gnu/Linux was not long before that. Those initiatives pretty much grew together.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#254

Post by pjmlp »

mattl wrote: post #251
pjmlp wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harmful is wanting to be paid for their work while expecting others to give their work for free. It is plain impossible to live from selling desktop software with source code available, without having others in the first week come around and re-bundle it, Sourceforge style.

Most of the GNU/Linux desktop stuff is GNOME, and a lot of GNOME developers work at Red Hat, but not exclusively. If you want to work on free software desktop applications, I would consider working at a company like that. A lot of desktop software is commodity stuff — mail clients, office suites, browsers, photo editing and the like. But there are some areas where we need to be better, such as video editing.

I gave up on that dream long time ago, I rather have paying customers.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#255

Post by wendy0x2 »

mattl wrote: post #240
wendy0x2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't rude at all. He was describing a situation in the Linux community where a large number of users have an aversion to paid software. It's a real problem and one of the main reason osx was able to eclipse desktop software usage on linux in such a short amount of time. Responses like yours are the real problem. If you want linux desktop software to grow, there needs to be room for proprietary software.

Also, please don’t conflate paid software with proprietary software. You can pay for either, but only proprietary software is the issue.

A company can't survive on paid oss (gnu/gpl). The license allows anyone to purchase it and then go ahead and give it out for free, which would happen in short order.

Support doesn't work for many small companies, because you just don't have the manpower, so proprietary software is necessary.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#256

Post by mattl »

toopsss wrote: post #253
mattl wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not telling people what is good for them. I’m describing the reasons for the creation of the GNU/Linux operating system. What proprietary software is being used on servers? I believe most Android users don’t know about user freedom, and those that do would greatly prefer a more generic, “pure” Android experience vs the poor quality applications installed by default on most non-Google phones. You’re confusing the…

> The GNU/Linux operating system was built long before open source was a thing. Please find someone that worked in the field during the 70s. They hopefully will kindly re-educate you on this BS. Also if you’re talking about the OSI of the late 90s I’d argue that gnu/Linux was not long before that. Those initiatives pretty much grew together.

I’m not talking about a community of sharing and improving software. That existed and is the reason Stallman started the free software movement and GNU.

I’m talking about the creation of the Open Source Initiative in 1998 and their initial distancing of software freedom from any practical benefits of the software created by the free software movement.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#257

Post by jjnoakes »

foepys wrote: post #196
FooBarWidget wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Hm, this reminds me of the Caddy, the HTTP server with Let's Encrypt integration. It's still open source, but a while ago they made the binaries paid (if you want it for free you need to compile it yourself). They got a lot hate for that; people were even accu…

And then when Let's Encrypt's certificate renewal server was down for a few hours, Caddy wasn't able to start because it required to establish a connection with LE to check the certificate and it wasn't able to determine that there was an old, still valid cert available on disk. The bug tracker on Github went wild because people were unable to bring their websites back up but the author was unwilling to acknowledge i…

I am not on any side in this battle, but the issue was closed only once, and after users disagreed with the author's reasoning for why it behaved the way it did, the author fixed it the same day it was closed...

Doesn't seem as bad as you are portraying it... certainly not "lost all its reputation for [you]" bad?

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#258

Post by detaro »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #249
detaro wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then see it only as "surprising and major change, negating the previous unique selling point, makes people unhappy".

I can't really see it as that, either. The source is still open, it's free to check out and compile.

> free to check out and compile

Which isn't a problem for you and me, but is for the kind of person that was attracted to it because it's easier than nginx+certbot, as I said in my initial comment. I saw 2 major users of it: this kind of user, and people wanting a small simple thing to stick in their container-based setup for HTTPS/reverse proxy duties. The latter more or less automatically updated to container images that do the build instead of loading a binary and didn't have a problem with even having to consider paying. For the first it was a problem, especially since the cost wasn't really in the ballpark of "I'd happily pay that to host a small blog".

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#259

Post by SteveCoast »

18pfsmt wrote: post #193
johnvanommen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 95% of the work that I do is on Linux. But I run a Windows laptop. Why? Because of the Outlook Calendar. It's kind of amazing that so many tech companies run on Linux, but the Outlook Calendar just won't go away. Nearly everything else in Windows I can replicate in Linux; Excel Spreadsheets, Microsoft Word, they all have Linux equivalents. But Calendar? Nope. I've seen solutions online, and I tried them, but no…

The relevant add-ons are Lightning and Exchange Calendar https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/lightning/ https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar/

Only works if your Exchange exposes the web interface.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#260

Post by jerguismi »

dpower wrote: post #168
magduf wrote: post #72

The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…

Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this. We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy…

> I would say about 50% of our customers are paying with the department credit card, and the other 50% buy it using their personal card.

Is this your way to determine if it is for business or personal use? Often in small companies and startups people use their personal credit cards for business purchases. Even in some bigger companies they do that, they just invoice it later separately.

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