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I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

ellie.wtf

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Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#101

Post by oefrha »

bad_user wrote: post #69

This is the dream for many of us, but I hope she comes up with a good business model that doesn't rely on the goodwill of people (e.g., open core) because FOSS is terrible for earning money. The reason is that FOSS is essentially part of the commons, but without being maintained by taxes. In general, people just want free stuff, companies rarely pay for support, and SaaS providers will steal your business if they can…

Author's project is a command line productivity tool. I have co-authored a now-archived command line productivity tool with half the number of stars (6-7k, maybe worth more today due to inflation) in the past, and my observation is people are generally very stingy with this type of projects. We did make people's lives a little bit better, but unlike frameworks, libraries, etc., it's not going to end up in any money-making product, so people don't think it's essential (it's not), and companies which tend to donate larger sums than individuals are completely out of scope. I think the total donation (through a PayPal link in README) we got over more than half a decade was less than $100. In comparison, I once made some web-based analytic tools when playing a casual mobile game, and got a few thousand in donations over a year or two -- not much considering the time that went into it, but two orders of magnitude better than the command line productivity tool.

However, we hardly ever marketed our project and never tried to "build a following" or beg for donations in any way, so maybe the author will do a lot better than us. The server component should also help remind people it's not free.

Edit: One thing I forgot: I think command line utilities are in a worse financial position than GUI utilities, because people are accustomed to paying for GUI apps, but aren’t accustomed to paying for things in the shell at all.

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#102

Post by nbobko »

ellieh wrote: post #74

Hey! Author here, thanks for sharing cwaffles Happy to answer any questions :)

I'm curious whether you've figured out a good monetization strategy for Atuin. The article doesn't answer that question.

Like you said, you won't be paying your rent with sponsors any time soon, but you've already quit your job. Are you living on your savings, and trying to come up with valuable paid features meanwhile? Is it the plan?

Anyway, good luck with whatever you're up to! Building a good monetization strategy is hard

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#103

Post by ellieh »

nbobko wrote: post #102
ellieh wrote: post #74

Hey! Author here, thanks for sharing cwaffles Happy to answer any questions :)

I'm curious whether you've figured out a good monetization strategy for Atuin. The article doesn't answer that question. Like you said, you won't be paying your rent with sponsors any time soon, but you've already quit your job. Are you living on your savings, and trying to come up with valuable paid features meanwhile? Is it the plan? Anyway, good luck with whatever you're up to! Building a good monetization strateg…

> Are you living on your savings, and trying to come up with valuable paid features meanwhile

Correct! I do already have a bunch of ideas I'd like to explore, will share more soon.

I'm lucky to have had a pretty good career so far, so my savings are more than enough for the next year or so

Thank you!

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#104

Post by ellieh »

cudder wrote: post #100
ellieh wrote: post #74

Hey! Author here, thanks for sharing cwaffles Happy to answer any questions :)

I can't seem to scroll with the arrow keys on your website (ellie.wtf). Is this intentional? Really annoying at the very least. Good luck on your project!

Not intentional, will see if I can sort it. Thanks!

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#105

Post by 255kb »

bad_user wrote: post #69

This is the dream for many of us, but I hope she comes up with a good business model that doesn't rely on the goodwill of people (e.g., open core) because FOSS is terrible for earning money. The reason is that FOSS is essentially part of the commons, but without being maintained by taxes. In general, people just want free stuff, companies rarely pay for support, and SaaS providers will steal your business if they can…

I can confirm that funding one's work on an open-source project through sponsoring is one hell of a ride. As you said, most people are not concerned by OSS funding, let alone companies that have a hard time justifying paying for something free...

However, OSS is not incompatible with some form of monetization, coming up with a plan to sell courses, custom services, or cloud options is probably a safer road.

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#106

Post by sjhdjshdjskhds »

bad_user wrote: post #69

This is the dream for many of us, but I hope she comes up with a good business model that doesn't rely on the goodwill of people (e.g., open core) because FOSS is terrible for earning money. The reason is that FOSS is essentially part of the commons, but without being maintained by taxes. In general, people just want free stuff, companies rarely pay for support, and SaaS providers will steal your business if they can…

[flagged]

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#107

Post by kolektiv »

chaosprint wrote: post #85

I quited my job as well to work on https://glicol.org I have a lot of feelings, but I don't have a blog so far. I feel that universities should alloc some of their funding to many of these open source projects and open source community should be better managed rather than donation. As for me, my plan is to start my own company and work on hardware .

I'm working on a hobby project at the moment, which at the moment is all about sequencing, and my long term plan is to integrate Glicol in some way - it's a great project, and I can't wait to start digging around further.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with hardware - I'm sure it'll be cool!

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#108

Post by wt__ »

WD-42 wrote: post #40
ilaksh wrote: post #34

Has anyone who uses fish shell compared that to Atuin? I suspect that having my entire shell history accessible might not really be necessary.

I have the same question. Lots of comments here from people hand rolling complex solutions to what it seems like fish does out of the box. Commands per directory, partial completions. Heck there’s even an embedded web server ui for searching and manipulating the history. Multi device sync is not there without some effort but I don’t really care to mix my personal history with my work machines anyway.

> Multi device sync is not there without some effort but I don’t really care to mix my personal history with my work machines anyway.

Yep, obviously there are many benefits to per-device history, but I think I'd find it more annoying having it synced between devices, especially if there are commands that either won't work on a particular machine or might even be dangerous in a different environment.

Re: I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

#110

Post by ellieh »

the_arun wrote: post #30

What is the security of this? 1. If someone steals my laptop & breaks in, can they get access to all my history 2. After breaking, if they run `atuin key` will get them the key for my history which they can use from any device (if they know the userid) 3. If you are running servers passing passwords as command line arguments in that device, they have all that.

> 1. If someone steals my laptop & breaks in, can they get access to all my history

Yes, but this is the case anyway with current shell history. I think if someone breaks into your laptop you have bigger problems than your shell history. It's best to get into the habit of not pasting secrets into your shell

> 2. After breaking, if they run `atuin key` will get them the key for my history which they can use from any device (if they know the userid)

They would need your username, your password, _and_ your encryption key

> 3. If you are running servers passing passwords as command line arguments in that device, they have all that.

Yes. If you're doing this, then all of your passwords are currently stored as plaintext in your home directory - with or without Atuin. I'd consider them no longer secure if this is the case, as any program you run could read .bash_history

Atuin by default comes with a set of filters to ignore secrets and not record them to history - AWS creds, slack creds, GitHub tokens, etc etc. So it may well reduce the impact of this

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