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…
While it's certainly challenging, it's not terrible, but it requires some thought and a sustainable business model, something many FOSS developers don't want to do. https://piero.dev/category/foss-funding/
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 feel that universities should alloc some of their funding to many of these open source projects
Can you expand on this? Why would universities fund these projects?
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-m…
>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.
I think that's because command line tools are more appealing to technical people. For convenience sake and ease of use, most average computer users will use GUI tools or applications.
Not really. You just need to be strategic. $5/m for example would be reasonable for a hosted version of this, maybe add some AI touches for pro users, and then have thousands just expense it as it is well below thresholds, or just pay for it themselves.
5 a month with 1,000 users is 5,000 a month. You add in the costs and taxes and you are left with supporting a thousand users that you can't afford to hire for. If you had 2,000 users you might be able to afford someone but now you have to support 2,000 users. If prices were tripled you could afford to staff for now and the future (r/d). When small you need to go higher. When you are big you can use size to scale.
Why would they need to hire? I’m running a $5k/mo business with thousands of users and Im working solo. I have 1~2 support chat message per day which takes 10 minutes.
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-m…
I think this is pretty accurate as a general rule. Anecdotally, the only CLI utility I pay for is Filebot: https://www.filebot.net/
What should I be using shell history for? I've never wanted to go back in my history but obviously people are getting a lot of value from it.
I’ll sometimes write a useful one liner that I want to write a shell script off but if I’m in the middle of something and don’t have time I’ll do this:
| | # add script for this
The # comment makes it easy for me to search through my history to find one liners I want to use to build a shell script from
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-m…
>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. I think that's because command line tools are more appealing to technical people. For convenience sake and ease of use, most average computer users will use GUI tools or applications.
I'm specifically talking about developer utilities. Even developers are accustomed to paying for GUI apps but not command line stuff. To be fair I've never seen anyone selling a local (non-SaaS) command line only tool either.
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 feel that universities should alloc some of their funding to many of these open source projects Can you expand on this? Why would universities fund these projects?
It doesn't make sense to me either. Universities barely even fund the lifecycles of their own research based software projects.
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 feel that universities should alloc some of their funding to many of these open source projects Can you expand on this? Why would universities fund these projects?
Maybe this doesn't apply to all situations. It's just that in my case, especially in music technology, I often see funding being allocated to things that I think are somewhat disappointing, and of course, that's just my subjective opinion. More often than not, it is an overall lack of funds. Many open source projects are actually of great academic value and worthy of study. In fact, many contributors to open source projects love blogging. I often feel more rewarded reading these blogs than dozens of pages of academic papers. I can clearly feel that I will have more time to make pure open source contributions during my funded Ph.D., or even when I am lecturing at the university. But now I have to balance it with some practical considerations.
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 feel that universities should alloc some of their funding to many of these open source projects Can you expand on this? Why would universities fund these projects?
I do think a similar thing to the GP, on my case it's because universities have the problem of "how to fund potentially society-changing projects that mostly go nowhere and depend on really qualified people" closest to solved than any other institution.
There's a lot of problems that I do think universities could be working on. Creating free software is one of them.