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How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

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Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#191

Post by nemiah »

bigiain wrote: post #175
nemiah wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The management works like this: Every open3ABox has an open websocket connection to my server. I do the monitoring over this connection and for updates and support I tell the box over the websocket connection to forward a port via ssh to my server. The port will be automatically closed by the open3ABox after three hours. This means no constantly open port and an encrypted connection where only my server is allowed to…

Nice. Reverse ssh tunnels are a really good way to manage stuff like that.

Thanks :)

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#192

Post by nemiah »

prepend wrote: post #166
nemiah wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intention with this blog post was only to write down my story. No marketing intended :)

Thanks, I thought it was kind of refreshing how you weren’t linking to your site and liked to see content that didn’t just seem like seo or a sales pitch.

I have no need for doing sales pitches anymore :D

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#193

Post by path411 »

bigiain wrote: post #172
nemiah wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this because I'm in it for the long run. Sure, maybe it won't pay off, but my "first directive" is, to get people to use my open3A. If they've put all their data in it and miss some feature in the future it is more probable that they will just buy it from me instead of going through the hassle of moving to another solution. If they have a good support experience that just gives them a better feeling with my soft…

I think you've hit a really nice market niche too. If you get a support call it's from someone having difficulty extracting money from someone else because invoicing isn't working. So long as you solve that problem for them they'll associate your software as being directly valuable to their bottom line, and that'll make them much more likely to agree to pay money for it. I suspect that approach wouldn't work nearly s…

On the flip side, you can get very angry customers calling you and saying your broken software is preventing them from making money, or even worse, losing money. When I worked for a niche shopify like business this made for not fun emergencies. Even less fun if we made their POS not work.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#194

Post by berkes »

system2 wrote: post #186
chrisseaton wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You sell additional premium extension ...which are open source.

I think open source doesn't matter. Any open ecommerce application has premium opensource extensions (magento, woocommerce, opencart etc.) I think the irritation is that the author made it sound like he is giving everything for free and gets donations to survive.

She never implied this in the article.

What sentence or word choice made you think she lives off donations?

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#195

Post by berkes »

la_fayette wrote: post #95
leovailati wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering here, is there any way to protect oneself from that type of situation while at the same time keeping the source code open? Obviously, the name and logo are trademarked, but a third party could rebrand the program while using the same underlying source code.

The advanced features seem to be a good protection. Also the cost ist quite low, if you competing in the same market could you offer the service cheaper? I guess not. Moreover it is critical software for small businesses, I think many would pay for long term support on the original software...

Whether you can offer open source software cheaper, depends a.o. on scale.

Which is what AWS used to outprice elastic and redis.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#196

Post by jackson1442 »

rambojazz wrote: post #189

> The customer gets the code (and functionality) after she bought it. What are the licenses of the software and the extensions in the shop? Is this one of those free-core/proprietary-plugins model?

According to one of the author's other comments, they are also licensed as AGPL. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26428460

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#197

Post by prox »

sdlion wrote: post #169
thunfischbrot wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am not one of those commenting on such issues except for your prompt–my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast. Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good. Had this at happen in at least eight instances. Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and production environments, unless you take gre…

> Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss Though in my experience as a technician installing 2.5" consumer grade / entry level Kingston/ADATA SSD to several clients, this is what generally will kill NAND flash devices, it's not an exclusive phenomenon to uSD cards. I have a few running RPi's on premises for years. Ranging from v1 to now v4, certainly the only uSD 3 failures I have had has been wi…

One of the first things I bought for my Raspberry was a battery hat, it’s great. When the power goes out, it keeps on trucking. I would love to add a solar panel or wind turbine as an extra power source.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#198

Post by amenod »

bigiain wrote: post #178
amenod wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means, it is sometimes (often even?) used as a synonym for "source available", as opposed to "free software" (which is the term that FSF promotes). I'm not saying which term is better, just explaining why "open source" might not be objectively wrong in this case.

I doubt there's anybody who uses the term "open source" that didn't just read it in the latest issue of CTO Monthly who'd argue against code under the AGPL being "clearly open source". Being on Github doesn't make a project open source. Having a way for other people to easily contribute doesn't make a project open source. But being licensed under AGPL 100% does make a project open source.

That was not my point. I also happen to agree with you - AGPL is "open source" under any definition I have encountered.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#199

Post by GordonS »

bekindandopen wrote: post #159
GordonS wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As this point, it's practically a meme. I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these dev…

Could you expand more on the "mobile land rigs"? I've always wondered if any organizations have tried to make something like a Sandcrawler.

Heh, it's nothing so fancy. There are a bunch of different types of land rig: some small ones come apart and get stuffed in the back of vans/lorries, others sit on a trailer, and some are self-propelled[0] [1].

Of course, it's not just 1 piece of equipment that moves around it's people, tech etc - some land rigs are almost semi-nomadic, with the whole camp moving around.

[0] https://www.nov.com/products/mobile-rigs

[1] https://www.nov.com/-/media/nov/files/products/rig/rig-equip...

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#200

Post by imhoguy »

nemiah wrote: post #141
imhoguy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it is opened to the Internet? May be just a box behind a NAT calling home and/or be part of closed VPN swarm. I would love to hear how the management part got implemented.

The management works like this: Every open3ABox has an open websocket connection to my server. I do the monitoring over this connection and for updates and support I tell the box over the websocket connection to forward a port via ssh to my server. The port will be automatically closed by the open3ABox after three hours. This means no constantly open port and an encrypted connection where only my server is allowed to…

That is very clever, I like it. Especially dependency on proven and simple technology. VPN swarm like e.g. ZeroTier which I was thinking about would be too complex and thus harder to maintain.

Thank you for the explanation!

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