Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mailpile: Let’s take email back

mailpile.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 241 posts

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#231

Post by alecco »

nhangen wrote: post #110
alecco wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an ideal world BSD/MIT would be the best choice. But in the current startup world several aynrandian douchebags would take it and make web services or paid apps. Put a lot of money on viral marketing. Pester them with feature requests. And never, ever contribute back to the community or acknowledge it helped their business. I know a famous BSD developer who switched to *GPL because of this. Also, search for tptace…

what does Ayn Rand have to do with any of this?

Sociopaths rationalizing themselves as titans of some kind. Economic superheros who shouldn't be bound to basic tit-for-tat rules. Rules even the most primitive cultures follow.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#232

Post by chipotle_coyote »

hnriot wrote: post #191
diminoten wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twice that? Easily? Color me skeptical...

Yes, twice, salaries in Silicon Valley for engineers are $150k +/- depending on experience and ability level.

There certainly are engineering jobs at $150K and higher, but every survey I've seen -- and this more or less matches the offers I've seen -- suggests the median engineering salary here is just a little over $100K.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#233

Post by oakaz »

alextingle wrote: post #209
oakaz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe we aren't in the same planet.

You sound like you're getting pretty emotional. Time for a cup of tea and a sit down?

yeah, I'm really upset to not have any alternative of Gmail. What do you recommend ?

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#234

Post by read »

smokeyj wrote: post #170
diminoten wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twice that? Easily? Color me skeptical...

I was pulling in more out of high school. Trust me, half is being generous.

True, an engineer could make twice as much, but discussing compensation rather than strategy might be missing the forest for the trees.

Why do the Mailpiles believe privacy is the best angle to help people the most in taking email back? If you were to work on only one thing to fix email, would privacy be the most important thing to work on?

The counterargument here isn't examples of specific cloud services like Dropbox that people can trust. It's an argument for general global security. Organizations like the United Nations Security Council and NATO generally provide a much stronger joint defense against evil than individual pieces of armor offered to citizens.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#235

Post by binarycrusader »

icebraining wrote: post #210
binarycrusader wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it prevents a choice of more liberal licensing later. Ogre3D was able to successfully transition from LGPL to MID/BSD because of contributor agreements. The Apache Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and others all require contributor agreements for very good reasons. If your projects starts out with very liberal licensing, it's not necessary strictly speaking (unless you're concerned about patents…

Yeah, but the Apache Foundation already has a permissive license, and nobody expects the FSF to re-license a project, except maybe to a new version of the same. By choosing the (A)GPL but forcing contributors to grant relicensing rights, you've excluded both those who consider copyleft licenses non-free, and those who consider copyleft licensing an important requirement.

Did you miss the part where I mentioned patent agreements which is another good reason why Contributor Agreements are important?

And while the Apache Foundation already has a "permissive license" it's not quite as permissive as BSD / etc.

And if the Apache Foundation wants to relicense, to say, a future version of their license, they're still going to potentially need that contributor agreement.

Again, as I said before, there are tradeoffs.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#236

Post by binarycrusader »

nhaehnle wrote: post #212
binarycrusader wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it prevents a choice of more liberal licensing later. Ogre3D was able to successfully transition from LGPL to MID/BSD because of contributor agreements. The Apache Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and others all require contributor agreements for very good reasons. If your projects starts out with very liberal licensing, it's not necessary strictly speaking (unless you're concerned about patents…

It might also discourage contributors who don't want a transition to a different license. After all, contributor agreements also give the power to go closed source later on.

Like I said, tradeoffs. LLVM for example doesn't require copyright assignment, but does require a contributor agreement for patent purposes for significant contributions.

Contributor agreements are a necessary mechanism to protect the project and ensure its future when dealing with patents or preparing for the potential of relicensing.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#237

Post by daurnimator » 

    Mailpile stores in RAM about 180 bytes of metadata per message (actual size depends largely on the size of various headers), but Python overhead brings that to about 250B. This means handling a million messages should consume about 250MB of RAM - not too bad if you consider how much memory your browser (or desktop e-mail client) eats up.
Totally killed my interest, I want to run this on a small server (e.g. NAS), for everyone in my family

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#238

Post by binarycrusader »

HerraBRE wrote: post #214
binarycrusader wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if they were making $100K, then taxes and witholding, etc. will leave them with roughly 65% of their gross. So they'd actually be taking home closer to $5416 per month. Still "sad" (given that average rental rate on a two-bedroom apartments is $2K+ per month in the general bay area), but not quite as much.

We will be doing this legally, which means paying ourselves salaries and paying taxes etc. etc.

I wasn't implying otherwise; and the figure I provided is what a typical employee should see in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was just saying that the figures others were reporting were overly pessimistic.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#239

Post by HerraBRE »

nhangen wrote: post #142
saraid216 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused as to what you imagine "meet them halfway" actually entails.

Ask for enough money to have say 3-6 months of resources, which would force them to figure out pricing/business economics before the money runs out, and forces them to invest in the idea as much as their backers do. First reaction for me was: 'Wow, this is awesome, and I'm looking for something like this. How much do they need? Wow, 100k to build a mail app? No thanks.' I get that this is a free product and is open s…

We have actually put a fair bit of thought into this, but the pitch has to be relatively focused. Publicly speculating about things which may change is not a good way to manage expectations.

One core question is: how big a team will we need in a years time to continue development? The answer to that depends on many factors - since this is open source, it is actually perfectly OK to work for a year, ship something awesome and hand off to the community once things are a bit more mature.

However, since we do assume there will still be quite a bit of work to do in a years time, our preferred business model is actually listed in the pitch: backers are joining a community and we will reach out to them again in a years' time and ask them to continue supporting us if they are happy with the work we have done. Mailpile has a broad enough appeal that it may be possible to sustain the team using this model alone, which would IMO be ideal.

However, plan B includes things like grants from human rights / free-speech orgs that need better tools for activists in the field, corporate support from companies unsatisfied with the current crop of tools, and subscription support services (like https://pagekite.net/, SMTP relaying, etc) which help the average Joe run his own Mailpile.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#240

Post by HerraBRE »

alextingle wrote: post #202
HerraBRE wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! The idea is you run Mailpile on a machine you control (it is an MUA), either your laptop (and connect to localhost) or a home server like a plug computer or something like that - basically somewhere where you feel comfortable storing your secret keys. And yes, API access to mail is something we already support, every "command" can return either HTML, plain text or JSON. Probably XML to come as well. We'll hav…

It sounds like your approach to storing the secret key is going to be an issue for some people. I see the reasoning behind your current design, but still none of the options look really great... a. Home server. Most people don't have a fixed IP or domain name, so it's going to be a pain for them to access their home server on the run. I do have a fixed IP, but I'd still hesitate to rely on my home connection whilst I…

a. and b. are actually significantly mitigated by https://pagekite.net/ , which just happens to be my other project. :-)

c. might be OK for some, but we don't recommend it.

Another solution is to run Mailpile in multiple places and teach it to sync multiple instances. Complicated, but might be worth doing.

Post reply on HN