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

How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

indiehackers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 214 posts

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#11

Post by loloquwowndueo »

tasogare wrote: post #10
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #8

The demo site is in German; a language selector is not obviously findable. It’s also excruciatingly slow to load! “Let the software speak for itself” - well, it did - if I were evaluating invoicing software I’d go look elsewhere mainly based on this very poor first impression. Could certainly use some optimization / speed up.

> The demo site is in German The target market is probably Germany. The post mentions amount of money in euros, but never other currencies used in English-speaking countries. It make sense to not internationalize the website if the product doesn’t fit the international market (I bet invoices have different legal requirements everywhere).

And yet the blog article is in English and it was promoted in an English site (hacker news :)

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#12

Post by nephics »

mosaic_school wrote: post #7

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.

As far as I can tell it is AGPL licensed PHP code, you can download the code, run it, and modify/fork it freely. Code is open source, but it is not developed in the open.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#13

Post by amenod »

mosaic_school wrote: post #7

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.

Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means, it is sometimes (often even?) used as a synonym for "source available", as opposed to "free software" (which is the term that FSF promotes).

I'm not saying which term is better, just explaining why "open source" might not be objectively wrong in this case.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#14

Post by sltkr »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #8

The demo site is in German; a language selector is not obviously findable. It’s also excruciatingly slow to load! “Let the software speak for itself” - well, it did - if I were evaluating invoicing software I’d go look elsewhere mainly based on this very poor first impression. Could certainly use some optimization / speed up.

The site feels rather snappy to me. The backend is powered by PHP; most pages load in 100-200 ms, which is very reasonable. I've certainly used much, much slower software, especially for business purposes.

Maybe the demo site is suffering from whatever the hacker news equivalent of slashdotting is, or the host might not be well-connected to the internet outside Europe.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#15

Post by scbrg »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #11
tasogare wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The demo site is in German The target market is probably Germany. The post mentions amount of money in euros, but never other currencies used in English-speaking countries. It make sense to not internationalize the website if the product doesn’t fit the international market (I bet invoices have different legal requirements everywhere).

And yet the blog article is in English and it was promoted in an English site (hacker news :)

The "blog" article is in English because it's posted in an English speaking community (who are presumably more interested in the story than the software itself).

It's "promoted" on HN by someone other than the author, it seems.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#16

Post by jpetso »

clcaev wrote: post #2

[revision] In the comments section, following the article, she notes the extensions are open source, distributed when purchased. The license used for these extensions is not specified. Thank you for pronoun correction.

Quoting the author from the comments:

> Yes, the plugins are open source, too. Customers can test what they will get in an online demo which is available on my website.

> They get the functionality as well as the code after they bought the extension in my shop.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#17

Post by jeroenhd »

mosaic_school wrote: post #7

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.

You can download [1] the latest release of open3a to find not only the PHP source code, but also an AGPL license. This isn't open contribution software (no public Gitlab project to do pull requests and such) but the source code itself seems perfectly open source.

Even still, open source licenses may be used to sell software for which the source code is not available before purchase. For example, the Apache 2.0 license can be used for this; it protects users of altered versions of the source code from patent infringement lawsuits and forces the Apache license to be passed on to the end users of the modified work. It doesn't forbid throwing the source onto a repository somewhere, of course, so the source doesn't remain closed for long, but I can imagine many businesses wouldn't want to sell their technical support to a company that published their source code, and businesses are generally wary of using software without any form of support.

There's various ways people use the term "open source" and I think in general people mean "software that's available publicly for free" when they use it, but some of the open source licenses allow for some propietary-like behaviour while using them.

[1]: https://www.open3a.de/page-Download

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#18

Post by yakubin »

nephics wrote: post #12
mosaic_school wrote: post #7

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.

As far as I can tell it is AGPL licensed PHP code, you can download the code, run it, and modify/fork it freely. Code is open source, but it is not developed in the open.

The article doesn't mention GPL. It's unlikely that this code is GPL-licensed. Moreover, yeah, probably the customer can modify the code, but can they resell it or share it with someone else for free? If not, it's not open source.

From "The Open Source Definition"[1]:

> The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd>

UPDATE: it seems it is licensed under AGPLv3. So it is open source. Interesting.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#19

Post by monsieurbanana »

yakubin wrote: post #18
nephics wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell it is AGPL licensed PHP code, you can download the code, run it, and modify/fork it freely. Code is open source, but it is not developed in the open.

The article doesn't mention GPL. It's unlikely that this code is GPL-licensed. Moreover, yeah, probably the customer can modify the code, but can they resell it or share it with someone else for free? If not, it's not open source. From "The Open Source Definition"[1]: > The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing pro…

I'm sure I've spend less time downloading the zip, opening it, and seeing a "agpl.txt" file than you did writting that comment.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#20

Post by christogreeff »

tasogare wrote: post #10
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #8

The demo site is in German; a language selector is not obviously findable. It’s also excruciatingly slow to load! “Let the software speak for itself” - well, it did - if I were evaluating invoicing software I’d go look elsewhere mainly based on this very poor first impression. Could certainly use some optimization / speed up.

> The demo site is in German The target market is probably Germany. The post mentions amount of money in euros, but never other currencies used in English-speaking countries. It make sense to not internationalize the website if the product doesn’t fit the international market (I bet invoices have different legal requirements everywhere).

Yeah, from the comments on the blog: "The German market would be Germany, Switzerland and Austria. That's over a hundred million people. Works for me "
Post reply on HN