Love it. The raspberry pi is a cool addition.
How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
201–210 of 214 posts
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never had the experience of pricing a product, but my intuition tells me this could be a win. We occasionally see articles on HN that describe how to increase prices without losing your audience. Perhaps there are others here that can offer feedback and advice. Research and experiment. If you do embark on this, a postmortem write-up with your learnings would be a great read. Best of luck with whatever your plans…
Thank you! For the reference, until I released version 3.0.0 (last November) the price was $3.50 (and all of it went to charity). The number of sales didn't take a hit - but it coincided with some publicity and major improvements to the app.
Great App!
Just purchased 2 copies cause I am lazy building it from source & cause charity, why not!
Tested the demo about 1 hour ago and I was impressed. Very good UI and fast scanning, although on the icons are a bit on the small size for my taste but excellent otherwise.
Keep up the great job :)
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#203Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.
You can download [1] the latest release of open3a to find not only the PHP source code, but also an AGPL license. This isn't open contribution software (no public Gitlab project to do pull requests and such) but the source code itself seems perfectly open source. Even still, open source licenses may be used to sell software for which the source code is not available before purchase. For example, the Apache 2.0 licens…
What's to prevent someone from putting it up on GitHub? Of course the customers are buying support too, and OP could probably make a copyright takedown if the name and logos are used as-is, but it sounds somewhat risky. There again I haven't built a successful business like this, so what do I know :-)
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can download [1] the latest release of open3a to find not only the PHP source code, but also an AGPL license. This isn't open contribution software (no public Gitlab project to do pull requests and such) but the source code itself seems perfectly open source. Even still, open source licenses may be used to sell software for which the source code is not available before purchase. For example, the Apache 2.0 licens…
What's to prevent someone from putting it up on GitHub? Of course the customers are buying support too, and OP could probably make a copyright takedown if the name and logos are used as-is, but it sounds somewhat risky. There again I haven't built a successful business like this, so what do I know :-)
Very little, indeed. However, just a blob of source without any updates or progress isn't very useful. I doubt many companies will buy software and take it upon themselves to maintain a public repository of someone else's source code. There's no profit to be made in that.
The copyright itself couldn't be used to take the code down, because the open license allows the customer to do exactly that.
Theoretically, a customer can buy the software, fork it, and turn it into an open source fork. Without the support contract to receive updates, though, I doubt that'll be very useful in the end.
At worst, a competitor buys your software and uses your own software against you by analysing, publishing and extending it, and selling support contracts in your market. However, I strongly doubt there's much money to be made that way.
I'm no businessman either so I wouldn't know what brings companies to make software like that. I think these licenses were born in an era of offline, compiled blobs that received updates every month at the most, whereas modern software development is much more focused on freemium and SaaS.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! For the reference, until I released version 3.0.0 (last November) the price was $3.50 (and all of it went to charity). The number of sales didn't take a hit - but it coincided with some publicity and major improvements to the app.
Great App! Just purchased 2 copies cause I am lazy building it from source & cause charity, why not! Tested the demo about 1 hour ago and I was impressed. Very good UI and fast scanning, although on the icons are a bit on the small size for my taste but excellent otherwise. Keep up the great job :)
Thank you! In the settings (scroll to the bottom) there is a "-" and "+" between "reset zoom" button. That will help you adjust icon size and text across the app. Great for a 4K TV.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Effective altruism is a value . A practicing Catholic may find the most effective interventions to be against their religion. A less strict Christian may feel that effectiveness overrules religious directives. In any case, you're operating under your values .
Altruism is simply a concern for others. In broad sense it can mean that you care whether others get more value (according to either receivers' opinion or your opinion about values). "Effective" just means you don't want to waste money or time on values not important (according to either receivers' opinion or your opinion). The fact that Givewell chooses certain values (the rational ones) and Christianity slightly di…
"Rationality" is similar to "effectiveness", in that it's value-neutral. The existing movement named "rationalism", of course, is made of people who have particular values.
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never had the experience of pricing a product, but my intuition tells me this could be a win. We occasionally see articles on HN that describe how to increase prices without losing your audience. Perhaps there are others here that can offer feedback and advice. Research and experiment. If you do embark on this, a postmortem write-up with your learnings would be a great read. Best of luck with whatever your plans…
Thank you! For the reference, until I released version 3.0.0 (last November) the price was $3.50 (and all of it went to charity). The number of sales didn't take a hit - but it coincided with some publicity and major improvements to the app.
How do you collect the money?
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#208I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source. Asking this because sometimes I also wonder if I should open source my project, but I have my doubts on how much you can gain from it (apart from the nice feeling of contributing to open source ;))
Sometimes a client sends me some code to put in my version for future updates. But other than that, I don't work with contributions. It's more the feeling for me, yes :)
I'm wondering, if someone sends me code to include in my project, how can I be sure they are the rightful copyright owners of that piece of code? Also what kind of legal liability it might put me in if I then publish that code as open source?
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#209Earlier 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.
Open source == no protection. You rely on the morals of your customers. At any time somebody bigger than you can take your free source, modify it, make it better because they have already a base and sell it as closed proprietary software and you can't do anything about it.
> rely on the morals of your customers ...
If they are just abiding by the license, would that be considered "immoral"?
Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application
#210This seems like an interesting business-model, charge for the open source software because it is worth the money for your customers, and nobody could do the same as cheaply, and because you fly under the radar.
But assume profits are increasing and competitors arise. Then what would you do? How would you compete with them? Would you try to make the publicly distributed software less maintainable by for instance reducing the amount of documentation that comes with it?
You might have multiple versions of your source-code, some with comments and some without. You could then choose whether to distribute the version with code-comments or one without.
You might go further and apply some kind of "minifier" to your source making it harder to understand and thus modify.
As far as I understand it GPL gives rights to the users of the software but puts few if any restrictions on the provider of the software. So would it therefore make sense to distribute (only) a minified version of your source-code? That would make it easier for you to compete against your competition.