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Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#41

Post by xvector »

allset_ wrote: post #35
satyanash wrote: post #3

Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.

The required subscription also means it's useless if they go out of business.

That's one of the biggest problems with subscription services. My favorite band's album was pulled from Spotify. Wouldn't have been a concern if I had set up Lidarr on my NAS.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#42

Post by rblatz »

miked85 wrote: post #28
azinman2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. We pay for convenience all the time. I just did in buying a synology NAS even though I could have pieces together my own solution (and have in the past). Having a working, maintained, stable, full featured email server that interops with the world isn’t something you can do quickly on your own even if you have the skills.

Of course, I agree with that. But this is, at least in my opinion, a very niche product. People who even understand what the product is would probably not be willing to pay a subscription for something they could setup on their own. Of course I could be completely wrong :)

Email is hard to do right, first I’m likely going to spend 2-3x the price on a server, so instantly we have 5 years of subscription covered by that price.

Then I have to buy an IP in a space that has a good reputation. Then I need to setup offsite backups, setup TLS and DKIM, plus a lot of stuff I’m sure I’m missing. Then I have to stay on top of patches and general maintenance. Plus I have to buy a domain name. Suddenly we’re looking at let’s say a 10 year lifespan before you need to upgrade. You are probably going to be basically even on costs but home built has a hundred of hours sunk into it too.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#43

Post by yashasolutions »

This should be encouraged and supported.

While I do have many questions, which would definitely delay an impulse buy, it is of general interest to have more companies trying to create easy to use products that help people to cut the cord with 5 companies that rules our digital lives today.

Now on with the questions I'd love to clarify:

- How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware?

- Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be?

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#44

Post by remram »

codetrotter wrote: post #30
remram wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that Nextcloud, Postfix, and Strongswan are copyleft. > You may obtain the complete corresponding source code from us for a period of three years after our last shipment of this product by sending a money order or check for $5 to: Without being illegal this is rather hostile. But then again they are selling subscriptions to open-source software so I expected something shady.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an onli…

As I said, it is legal, but strikes me as unnecessarily unfriendly. It is likely that I have unrealistic expectations, but putting their modified source code on some "archived" GitHub or similar would have been easy and free. Looking around at Purism, Pine, and remarkable, they don't make it that easy either, so I guess my complaint shouldn't be directed at Helm specifically.

My point is that we're not in 1997 anymore (date this GNU document was written), and thus I cannot believe that mailing disks is the easy way to do this. They are making this deliberately difficult, for both them and their users, by doing this over mail.

As for discouraging companies to deal with GPL, I am with you. I think this is a little bit different though, as they are not adding much value on top of the open-source code...

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#45

Post by azundo »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #39
codetrotter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an onli…

Hypothetically, could one not use this to get around GPL by modifying GPL software and agreeing to make the changes available to others but only at a ridiculous price?

My understanding is that the customers would be allowed to distribute/modify the source at that point though so you're not really getting around the GPL.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#46

Post by gsreenivas »

satyanash wrote: post #3

Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.

Hi there - co-founder/CEO of Helm here.

We don't make the subscription optional at this time because the overwhelming majority of people on the Internet do not have a static IP address with a corresponding PTR record, which is required if you want to have deliverable email. There are other ways to handle domain registration, DNS and backups on your own, but we believe the subscription is a pretty great value for the convenience it provides.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#47

Post by gsreenivas »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #4
Saris wrote: post #2

$99 a year for 128GB of backup space is really high, but I suppose it's partially paying for the OS updates or something like that? I also wonder about name confusion with Helm the Kubernetes management system.. That said it looks like a nice setup, the hardware price is pretty reasonable for a completed product, and the website is trying to keep things simple.

And I wonder how this could work for the 1TB version. Would it compress things locally so they could fit into the available 128GB space?

Hi there - Helm co-founder/CEO here. We will have additional tiers of subscription for customers to back up additional data with us. Everything is locally compressed before uploading and all backups are encrypted with keys only customers have.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#48

Post by stefan_ »

1MachineElf wrote: post #29

According to their blog post How Helm Works - Part 1: Networking [0], on the AWS side of things, for each Helm unit, they are provisioning an EC2 instance, an Elastic IP, and a Route 53 config. I suppose the 128GB backup is also part of this. From my perspective, $99/yr is not a bad deal for all this to be automatically managed. [0] https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networki...

So the first thing this "personal server that lives where you do" does is spin up some AWS instance? No thank you.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#49

Post by [deleted] »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #39
codetrotter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an onli…

Hypothetically, could one not use this to get around GPL by modifying GPL software and agreeing to make the changes available to others but only at a ridiculous price?

[deleted]

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#50

Post by anamexis »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #39
codetrotter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an onli…

Hypothetically, could one not use this to get around GPL by modifying GPL software and agreeing to make the changes available to others but only at a ridiculous price?

No, the GPL covers this case. In the FAQ linked in the parent comment, check out the "High or low fees, and the GNU GPL" section.

In particular, section 6(b) of GPLv3:

> Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

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