First platform to sell ruby gems? • Hacker News Board

Re: First platform to sell ruby gems?

#21

Post by aparadja » Fri, May 06, 2011, 6:48 AM UTC

did wrote: post #17

aparadja wrote: post #11

Slightly off topic, but I'm curious about the page's design. There have been a few others with the exact same kind of general vibe (showoff.io comes to mind first). The grainy background, sunken dark text, the whole thing. Is it just designers borrowing ideas from each other, or is there something I've missed?

I don't pretend to be a designer (I know how to use photoshop though) and I designed this page in 2 hours. I assume I follow the current trends. Nothing wrong, is it ?

Nothing wrong with the design in my non-designer-opinion. This wasn't meant as a criticism, I was genuinely curious about the trend.

Re: First platform to sell ruby gems?

#22

Post by jsavimbi » Fri, May 06, 2011, 7:25 PM UTC

did wrote: post #18

jsavimbi wrote: post #13

It pretty much contravenes the current community conventions surrounding Ruby and the sharing of gems. Good luck selling that to a community that was built by people sharing ideas and code while having them peer-reviewed, who are also adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code.

first, who speaks for the whole ruby community ? all the ruby/rails developers are a part of the ruby community but we never signed a paper telling us that we must not sell snippets of code. Besides, just to remind you something, I spent an extraordinary number of (not paid) hours on my open source project which is used by people making money of it (which is fair and I'm totally fine with that). Anyway, I don't have…

Rereading what I wrote, it's clear that I'm not accusing you of being evil, nor am I speaking for anyone nor am I telling you what the requirements are to be a part of the Ruby community.

I simply pointed out that your idea contravenes the current community conventions and that you would have a hard time getting quality developers to go along with you and contribute as the vast majority derive pleasure from sharing, modifying, improving and contributing their code to many projects in the most open and free manner currently possible.

So no, I, for one, am not interested in licensing my work for you to use on your platform as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers, I don't believe that selling gems at $30 here and there contributes in any way, shape or form to the progress of the community and as a business model, you're offering has a very low barrier to entry, plus a bad reputation (Hotscripts?).

Yes, people do make money selling plugins. No, I do not foresee the Ruby community lining up behind that idea as many of us make our money in implementation, not selling software that we'll need to later support in a volatile environment.

So again, good luck selling your pay-for-gems model to the Ruby community.

Also, and this is just an aside, but you should really have someone proofread your work before you broadcast it out like that, and if you're going to be so defensive when people don't agree with you, maybe you should stick to an easier business.

Re: First platform to sell ruby gems?

#23

Post by erangalp » Fri, May 06, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #3

Meanwhile, binpress is a general marketplace for people interesting in buying code: http://www.binpress.com/ . The site submitted lacks any detail whatsoever; they should at least be bothered to explain their service and its uses to developers and customers alike. The web design is basically boilerplate for Ruby web services, so it doesn't add any personal touches.

It doesn't seem too hard to understand what the service does, and they do explain explicitly in the homepage. Why all the hate?

Re: First platform to sell ruby gems?

#24

Post by kmfrk » Sat, May 07, 2011, 4:20 PM UTC

erangalp wrote: post #23

kmfrk wrote: post #3

Meanwhile, binpress is a general marketplace for people interesting in buying code: http://www.binpress.com/ . The site submitted lacks any detail whatsoever; they should at least be bothered to explain their service and its uses to developers and customers alike. The web design is basically boilerplate for Ruby web services, so it doesn't add any personal touches.

It doesn't seem too hard to understand what the service does, and they do explain explicitly in the homepage. Why all the hate?

There is no "hate", only criticism. Don't be so averse to it.

Re: First platform to sell ruby gems?

#25

Post by did » Sat, May 07, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

jsavimbi wrote: post #22

did wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

first, who speaks for the whole ruby community ? all the ruby/rails developers are a part of the ruby community but we never signed a paper telling us that we must not sell snippets of code. Besides, just to remind you something, I spent an extraordinary number of (not paid) hours on my open source project which is used by people making money of it (which is fair and I'm totally fine with that). Anyway, I don't have…

Rereading what I wrote, it's clear that I'm not accusing you of being evil, nor am I speaking for anyone nor am I telling you what the requirements are to be a part of the Ruby community. I simply pointed out that your idea contravenes the current community conventions and that you would have a hard time getting quality developers to go along with you and contribute as the vast majority derive pleasure from sharing,…

Let clear something up. I'm sorry but I reread yours 2 comments and you seemed to speak for the whole community (I quote: "..to a community...who are also adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code."). I talked to a lot of ruby dev and no one told me they were oppposed to my idea. What I'm saying here is that you do not represent the ruby community, you only speak for yourself and perhaps your dev friends.

However, there is perhaps a misunderstanding. I don't want to build the mirror of a paid version of rubygems.com. I simply use the gem workflow mechanism (which is robust and easy to use) in order to sell modules BUT in the context of a project (open source or not).

Besides, in php, there already are open source projects successfully working this way, I'm thinking about prestashop for instance. I also learned that some companies sells redhat and debian packages. Why not in ruby ?

One last thing, I'm not defensive but your first post was not constructive enough. You talked about a similar experience you had before (I quote: "... as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers"). Could you tell more about that ? That's the kind of answer I was expecting here. Thanks anyway :-)