41–50 of 243 posts
My company built this more than 10 years ago, and nobody was interested. Here's a press release from 2007: https://www.macworld.com/article/1058169/mcnucle.html
Might have something to do with the fact that McNucle is a freaking terrible name.
>It should be fast. We don’t want to make round-trips to a server to interact with the application. The cloud apps are not slow only because of moving data, but there is also a problem that an average server is fast(16cores CPU + 64GB RAM), but If it's used by let's say 100users, It means one user has only 0.16core + 0.64GB memory. So an average laptop(4cores/4GB) or phone(4cores/1GB) is way faster. Basically people…
I love this idea. Especially the end-to-end encryption for data that passes through a server to enable the ease of cloud computing without relinquishing data ownership. It also depends on _who_ owns the data. In an enterprise environment the company usually has a vital interest in the data and on-premise deployments are a good way of retaining cloud computing without giving up data ownership. I'm surprised that more…
https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing Syncthing solves a large part of syncing data between devices using your own VPS, server(s), etc. If your VPS provider goes out of business, you can then just fire up a new VPS and hook it back up to your local machine(s).
When I select software these are among the list of things I am looking for generally: - file formats that won’t lock you in or are even openly hackable (allows you to automate things) - no clouds that will break the software once it is gone - local storage with custom syncing or backup options - strictly no weird data collection or “We own the rights to your data”-Type of terms So if I get the slightest feeling of a…
I am the author of a SaaS app (https://partsbox.io/). I export in open formats (JSON), there is no lock-in, it's easy to get all of your data at any time. But the app is online and will remain so. Why? Economics. Maintaining a self-hosted solution is an enormous cost, which most people forget about. You need to create, document, maintain and support an entirely different version of your software (single-user, no billing/invoicing, different email sending, different rights system, etc). And then every time you change something in your software you have to worry about migrations, not just in your database, but in all your clients databases.
I am not saying it's impossible, it's just expensive, especially for companies which are built to be sustainable in the first place (e.g. not VC-funded). Believe me, if you don't have VC money to burn, you will not be experimenting with CRDTs and synchronizing distributed data from a multitude of versions of your application.
I regularly have to explain why there is no on-premises version of my app. The best part is that many people think that an on-premises version should be less expensive than the online version, and come without a subscription.
Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data. The problem is not inherently technical. The solution must address the fact that the software businesses favor cloud solutions and other systems that make it difficult to stop spending money
Yes. I always think data freedom is more important than software freedom. For example it matters less that MS Word is not free as in freedom when you can open the file in something that is.
"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (1975)
You don't have to invent entire new paradigms such as CRDT for this. Unix is all about site autonomy, no-BS tooling, simplicity, and portability. So for your next project, consider Unix/Linux as deployment target during development, and only then deploy it to a cloud-hosted Unix cluster, with a local-first but cloud-hosted DB such as PostgreSQL and standardized middleware such as AMQP/RabbitMQ/qpid rather than provid…
Switching to another cloud provider this way is trivial and usually only involves changing the Terraform configuration to setup a k8s cluster on another cloud. All k8s-specific config/deploy files can be reused on the new cluster.
This of course only works if (as you suggest) you stay away from cloud-specific services (SQS, aurora, ECS, S3) and run everything in-cluster, or use managed services that are available on multiple providers (Postgresql via RDS, or Digital Ocean managed Postgres, Cloud SQL on GCP)
>It should be fast. We don’t want to make round-trips to a server to interact with the application. The cloud apps are not slow only because of moving data, but there is also a problem that an average server is fast(16cores CPU + 64GB RAM), but If it's used by let's say 100users, It means one user has only 0.16core + 0.64GB memory. So an average laptop(4cores/4GB) or phone(4cores/1GB) is way faster. Basically people…
That's not a fair comparison since most of the memory usage is just loading the app in to memory and then everyone is sharing the same app already loaded. Web apps don't have to be nearly as slow as they are. It's just that it's easier to make a slow app than a fast one. Also desktop apps are becoming super slow and bloated now thanks to electron.
any marginally successful "local-first" app is going to go and raise $10m in vc, switch to software as a service, and add an enterprise mode that requires user permissions and data access to be managed on the server