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Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

blog.hiri.com

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

#171

Post by pkphilip »

brightball wrote: post #88
magduf wrote: 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…

Yep, totally agree with you there. After reading the article that was my first thought when he mentioned adding support for Google IMAP. Full stop. Don't do it. You have a product that is doing well as the solution for something with a clear business case that's not well addressed elsewhere. Own that market and focus your development attention on that Exchange ecosystem. As soon as you branch to IMAP/Gmail/General pu…

An email client without IMAP support is not going to get much traction. No one wants to have multiple email clients open at the same time.

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

#172

Post by keverets »

nailer wrote: 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.

I use Evolution every day with the evolution-ews plugin for accessing an Exchange server. It's still a bit clunky as it always was, and has some issues when switching between wired/wireless networks, but otherwise works fine for email, calendar, and contacts.

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

#174

Post by aeroevan »

nailer wrote: 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.

evolution (and evolution-ews, which is open source) work very well for office365. I personally only use the calendaring as read-only, but I assume it can create events. Email works fine.

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

#175

Post by siscia »

jsty wrote: post #152
siscia wrote: 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…

A small amount of hopefully useful feedback from someone who purchases business software: 1/ Your website gives a 'open source hobby app' vibe over 'professional, dependable software business'. Selling support contracts in particular requires some expectation that there's a solid business standing behind it that won't just be gone tomorrow. 2/ The 'redirect to an external store to download / purchase' will probably b…

Definitely good feedback, thanks.

A major restructuring of the main pages is necessary, I agree.

I definitely need to re-word most part of the website, because selling support should just be a small part of the closed source version that adds the replication feature.

I would re-think again about selling it in a different platform, but setting up a shop is not as easy as it is to just use plasso, maybe I can work better on the platform to make the two more similar.

I am definitely more than keen to provide email support, but also skype or any other meaning of support, I should definitely make it more apparent.

The idea to require a signup is to start building some sort of mail list, as I said I didn't focus on the marketing side so much...

Thank you a lot!

Your feedback was really really helpful!

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

#176

Post by dredmorbius »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #95
pmlnr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how the article looks like on 1280x800: https://i.imgur.com/L07L4ce.png Sticky header/footer, cookie consent covering the menu, not a single line of the content visible. You consider this design good? I might be wrong with this specific site on the JS - it only loaded 121KB Javascript. The actual HTML of the entry is 30. WordPress nowadays upgrades itself to minor version - security patches - without touching…

Having the blog post outside Medium doesn't guarantee them all looking better. On the other side, it is easier to fix one site using custom CSS than it is to fix a bunch. An on the other other side Firefox's reading mode makes this whole discussion irrelevant.

You can get high mileage from a fairly small set of stylesheets, though yes, you do have a point.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/hFzKwoir...

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

#178

Post by acomjean »

zaarn wrote: post #2

Quite a neat insight and somewhat confirming what I think personally; Linux users largely don't use Linux for FLOSS reasons. People who do use Linux for FLOSS reasons are however rather loud. I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Doing it right largely involves "don't treat the customer as a walking…

Every year end when I do my charitable donations I go through the applications I’ve been using and donate 10-20$.

It’s not a ton but it’s something. Libre office/Mozilla/ eclipse foundation/ sequel pro/ aqua emacs...

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

#179

Post by s73v3r_ »

yAnonymous wrote: post #137
magduf wrote: 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…

>you're just not going to get any significant number of home Linux users or enthusiasts to pay for your software. More like no significant number of home users are using Exchange. If every software that runs on Windows ran on Linux without restrictions, that would be the end of Windows right now and it's exactly what Microsoft are currently preparing for. They are shifting profits from Windows licenses to the app sto…

"If every software that runs on Windows ran on Linux without restrictions"

Except to many of those users, "Paying for a license to software" is seen as a restriction.

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

#180

Post by s73v3r_ »

pmlnr wrote: post #112
hiccuphippo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the blog post outside Medium doesn't guarantee them all looking better. On the other side, it is easier to fix one site using custom CSS than it is to fix a bunch. An on the other other side Firefox's reading mode makes this whole discussion irrelevant.

> An on the other other side Firefox's reading mode makes this whole discussion irrelevant. It really doesn't. It doesn't fix it for non-firefox and non-power users.

Safari also has a reading mode. I would be shocked if Chrome and Edge didn't as well.
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