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Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

blog.hiri.com

161–170 of 395 posts

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#161
> There is a lot to be said for products that have been shaped by free market forces.

So, not only are Linux users "fundamentalists", they are communists as well?

> If Linux as a platform is going to succeed, Linux users [..]

So adopting proprietary software is going to make Linux "a success"?

> think about the richness of the entire ecosystem rather than seek to limit it.

FOSS "limiting the richness of the entire ecosystem"? That's rich, indeed.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#162
post #97

I am trying to make a living with a software product, a database in particular. RediSQL, SQL steroids for Redis: http://redbeardlab.tech/rediSQL/ So let me share a different point of view. I find it extremely, extremely difficult. As far as I know, if you need a solution for in memory SQL as cache layer or also as main persistent layer it is the only available solution, on top of that it works on top of existing, wid…

Just checked out the software. Since you mentioned Sidekiq, I think the main reason it worked commercially is that almost every medium-sized web application needs a background job queue.

However, very few people expect their cache system to support SQL. So the main problem is that there is little or no demand for this type of software.

Anyways best of Luck! Hope you succeed.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#164
post #55

As an old school Linux desktop person from back in the day: whatever happened to Evolution? The whole reason it was created was to sell an Exchange client plugin.

The original plugin worked with the WebDAV support in Exchange, which was removed some versions ago. To make it work properly you need to support the MAPI protocol Outlook uses, which is undocumented and (at least used to be) obfuscated.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#165
post #138

I don't understand, why is there such a hard dichotomy between "commercial - binary blob" and open source? Why can't most commercial software ship with sources, with a sane license that allows a license holder to study, recompile and modify, but not publish derivative work? 90% of the people who want the source would not pirate the software, and 100% the pirates are satisfied with a binary copy. And don't tell me abo…

> why is there such a hard dichotomy between "commercial - binary blob" and open source? I see at least 2 reasons. 1) Mindset (and ignorance) I've worked in big telecom companies, in their technical teams, which means people who know about programming in big (BIG/HUGE) projects. Even there, many of their -very- experienced tech people were AFRAID of anything open-source. They were terrified that using anything that h…

There's a third issue - support.

I worked for a place about 15 years ago which was trying desperately to retire its previous flagship product in favour of the new version. The new version was better written and more scalable, but the major value for them was that they had made a big mistake with the old one -

The gave away source code and allowed customers to customise the software, but they still honoured support contracts. This had turned into a huge cost, as engineers were having to go out to customer sites and spend days figuring out what the customer had done.

You can't effectively support what you can't see, so you can only really support OR allow modifications.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#166
post #72

The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…

About 95% of the work that I do is on Linux. But I run a Windows laptop. Why? Because of the Outlook Calendar. It's kind of amazing that so many tech companies run on Linux, but the Outlook Calendar just won't go away.

Nearly everything else in Windows I can replicate in Linux; Excel Spreadsheets, Microsoft Word, they all have Linux equivalents. But Calendar? Nope.

I've seen solutions online, and I tried them, but none of them worked seamlessly. In particular, there's a plugin for Thunderbird. But it wouldn't connect with Office 365's calendar. (Email worked perfectly fine.)

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intention with this comment isn't to promote a culture of weaponized offense-taking. And I'm not even sure if the OP meant the term "fundamentalist" as an insult. But if so ... I think this would be insulting to persons who self-identify as Fundamentalist Christians [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism

Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. Fundamentalist Christians may decide to identify themselves with that word, but I've never heard of a FLOSS group calling themselves "Fundamentalist Open-Sourcers". Besides, the insult was not merely in that term, but also considering a "problem" (for him, maybe!) that some Linux users may want to keep their systems pure in term…

> Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English.

You may have misunderstood my point. Based on the assumption that the OP wants to avoid unintended insults, I was pointing out the issues one could associate with using "fundamentalist" as a term of derision.

I'm not trying to play PC-police. I was just raising the point in case the OP would want to know.

tl;dr

There are many English words that basically indicate membership in a particular group. Using those words as a term of derision is a slight against the target of those words and the original group.

E.g., "vandal", "gyp", or "hysterical". Or to whit, treating "fundamentalist" as synonymous with blind dogmatism.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#168
post #72

The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…

Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this.

We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy Hiri, it wasn't enough. IT departments don't want to support more than one email client. 100% adoption is simply not an option.

So we pivoted to the current model. A bottom up strategy that has made the company viable. I would say about 50% of our customers are paying with the department credit card, and the other 50% buy it using their personal card.

Another interesting find - the growth stage of any given company has a role to play too. Younger companies (both the age of the company and the age of the staff) seem to be more open to trying new software. I guess they don't bring any legacy issues to the table. The problem is that a lot of these young companies choose Gmail. This is why we have chosen to support Gmail.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#169
post #6

I am increasingly happy to pay for software and services as long as the organization producing the software has no relationship with advertisers. I would rather pay money than use something for free that includes advertising. If there are good open-source alternatives I will always prefer those, but there are definitely some things that open-source will never be able to really make work effectively (notably anything…

What happens when the product becomes unsupported, or the company goes under? I'd like to see more software sold with a code escrow clause -- if development stops or the company no longer offers support, the source is released by a third party. Maybe even under an open license.

If sublime text were to end all support today, I would have gotten triple-digit returns on that 75$ investment. Same for most software. Don’t get me wrong, unsupported paid software sucks and open sourcing abandoned projects means I would be more likely to buy something from that person/company again, but on some level a market clearing price takes this risk into account if we’re just talking about consumer applications.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. Fundamentalist Christians may decide to identify themselves with that word, but I've never heard of a FLOSS group calling themselves "Fundamentalist Open-Sourcers". Besides, the insult was not merely in that term, but also considering a "problem" (for him, maybe!) that some Linux users may want to keep their systems pure in term…

> Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. You may have misunderstood my point. Based on the assumption that the OP wants to avoid unintended insults, I was pointing out the issues one could associate with using "fundamentalist" as a term of derision. I'm not trying to play PC-police. I was just raising the point in case the OP would want to know. tl;dr There are many…

Ah, thanks for clarification.
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