If nemiah is reading these comments... well done! Loved your story!
How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
111–120 of 214 posts
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can boot the RPI off of an SSD nowadays, or boot off an SD card with the root file system on an SSD. I also used to be concerned about persisting data on a RPIs because of the SD card problem. But this setup is quite comparable to a standard Linux box with no replication. From there you can setup ZFS if you care to, or be satisfied with daily backups to the cloud.
I poked around and found her product page for the Rpi device, and she does couple it with a 120GB SSD and two USB sticks for backup. https://www.open3a.de/page-open3ABox
Oh, nice! I've never thought about using flash for backups, that's a very nice trade-off of for form factor and cost efficiency.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#113ITT: People who didn't read the article, argue how GPL would make this business model impossible, not realizing code in the article is AGPL licensed. smh, I expected better from HN.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#114I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...
I would love to build charity ware to help offset some of the ethically questionable things I do, but I was wondering how did you choose a cause to donate toward? Did you know someone personally who perished from malaria? There’s so many things that can be donated to I don’t know how to pick one or evaluate where donations would even be most effective.
Efforts work best when they are focused on helping with a problem that you have direct experience with.
I think the long term large impact of pushing back against these ethically questionable things, even at the expense of your long term career earnings potential, would have a better result for society.
If you can't push back on that stuff internally, consider publicizing the behaviors and starting a conversation around them.
Don't just dump money into a charity to assauge your conscience.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#115I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...
I would love to build charity ware to help offset some of the ethically questionable things I do, but I was wondering how did you choose a cause to donate toward? Did you know someone personally who perished from malaria? There’s so many things that can be donated to I don’t know how to pick one or evaluate where donations would even be most effective.
I use givewell.org to find charities. From their home page:
"We search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar."
They appear to be pretty transparent about how they choose charities to recommend. I don't want to misrepresent them, so please check out their site if you want more details.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#116I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...
I would love to build charity ware to help offset some of the ethically questionable things I do, but I was wondering how did you choose a cause to donate toward? Did you know someone personally who perished from malaria? There’s so many things that can be donated to I don’t know how to pick one or evaluate where donations would even be most effective.
I focus on cost-effectiveness of charities. Thankfully I can rely on the 10+ years of full-time research by a great team at GiveWell. The charity I chose is Against Malaria Foundation which is the top-rated charity by GiveWell:
https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
ps - I also, for 10 years now, give at least 10% of my income (aside from this project) to cost-effective charities as per my pledge through Giving What We Can https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ -- this is one of many initiatives that fall under the umbrella of EA (Effective Altruism) https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to build charity ware to help offset some of the ethically questionable things I do, but I was wondering how did you choose a cause to donate toward? Did you know someone personally who perished from malaria? There’s so many things that can be donated to I don’t know how to pick one or evaluate where donations would even be most effective.
Efforts work best when they are focused on helping with a problem that you have direct experience with. I think the long term large impact of pushing back against these ethically questionable things, even at the expense of your long term career earnings potential, would have a better result for society. If you can't push back on that stuff internally, consider publicizing the behaviors and starting a conversation aro…
Efforts work best when they are focused on cost-effective interventions, not things you have direct experience with.
Just about 100% of the US population have no experience with malaria. Yet it costs about $2 to provide a insecticide-treated net that protects on average 2 people for 2-3 years from malaria (while they sleep -- a common time for malaria transmission). There is arguably nothing you can do with $2 of resources in the US that can do as much good as this.
So, please focus on cost-effective charities with a proven track record, that use evidence-based methods to help individuals, and do it in a transparent way (so you know what's happening when you donate). To make it easier, start with GiveWell - an independent charity evaluator: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#118In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant…
This has been a usual business model for larger vendors (and servers): selling appliances. Google also did it (I think it was for intranet search), it was also one of the story threads in the Silicon Valley sitcom (see "the box"). When I launched my first startup, I also did something similar. Though we were selling a service: we'd deliver it as a 'box' (my co-founder actually called it 'the box' - before SV was aire…
And having a physical object adds some scarcity into the mix, which you need:
https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#119I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...
Pretty cool product. I have a very similar product but my question is that how did you convinced the users to pay for the product if its already free
The charity aspect is a strong motivator for many people.
Maybe George Costanza's idea -- The Human Fund, Money for People -- needs to be revisited.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can boot the RPI off of an SSD nowadays, or boot off an SD card with the root file system on an SSD. I also used to be concerned about persisting data on a RPIs because of the SD card problem. But this setup is quite comparable to a standard Linux box with no replication. From there you can setup ZFS if you care to, or be satisfied with daily backups to the cloud.
I poked around and found her product page for the Rpi device, and she does couple it with a 120GB SSD and two USB sticks for backup. https://www.open3a.de/page-open3ABox
Also as this is managed solution, I would offer encrypted offsite "cloud" storage.
Any part of the box fails? Send over a new one the next day which will automatically pull all saved data once the login/password is typed on the setup page.