Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by pnloyd » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

borracciaBlu wrote: post #115

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…

I do. I work with Linux and on my company we use exchange.. A part for that I pay for: - Skype credit - gitkraken (thanks electron!) And i would pay and pay and pay for a design software like sketch.. I have a lot of hope on figma.. Let see..

I'm a developer on Linux who wants to migrate into design. I want sketch on Linux so bad :-(

I realize though I probably need to Shell out for a Mac though. (Besides for a few brief moments in middle school, I have never used iOS believe it or not)

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

#212

Post by shimon » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #204

dpower wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly while it might sounds like I’m speaking out of my ass that’s a bad business model. Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that. The Office 365 web client is nearly identical these days and it runs in the browser. You aren’t going to out Office Microsoft that is just a fools errand. You can maybe focus on better mail clients for the desktop but there are quite a few goo…

They probably shouldn't try to compete so generally. "Better business email than outlook" is a very very difficult challenge. "Better tools to help developers who prefer Linux on the desktop function in a company committed to Microsoft" seems like a real market, but one far too small for a big company. That's the type of market that might be a great starting point for a startup.

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

#213

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

dpower wrote: post #168

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…

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…

Any business that is part Linux and part windows, exchange infrastructure, will need an exchange client for all their Linux client machines?

Assuming web based won’t cut it for those users, then it would seem Hiri is a good fit for that business?

I can’t see in what way you are competing or displacing Outlook if you are makinhg a product for Linux. The reason it’s a viable product would be 1) because there is no Linux outlook, and 2) because a business has users that have to run Linux while others run Outlook on windows, against the same Exchange infrastructure?

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

#214

Post by slrz » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #204

dpower wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly while it might sounds like I’m speaking out of my ass that’s a bad business model. Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that. The Office 365 web client is nearly identical these days and it runs in the browser. You aren’t going to out Office Microsoft that is just a fools errand. You can maybe focus on better mail clients for the desktop but there are quite a few goo…

> Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that.

Outlook may be a fine program for some types of office work but its MUA is one of the absolute worst mail programs in existence, surpassed only by certain webmailers and a collection of weird mobile apps handset manufacturers are probably paid serious money for shipping pre-installed on their (low-end) devices.

I have never seen a mailer being so actively destructive to email. The only times I receive mail that is more garbled and/or broken than that from Outlook users are the creepy web and mobile apps described above.

I have no idea whether all of this is the result of configuration errors on the user side. Maybe it's actually possible to configure the Exchange/Outlook combination to behave in a sane way. If so, this knowledge appears to be awfully rare among the Outlook- and Exchange-using population.

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

#215

Post by dkersten » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #113

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…

That, and the fact that people who would subscribe to /r/linux may be more ideological. I use Linux because I want a decent OS that doesn't spy on me. I've had no qualms with buying dozens of Linux games off Steam so far.

Yeah, it’s a very self selecting crowd.

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

#216

Post by trash_panda » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #18

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is little to no evidence of this. I don't think I've ever seen someone claim to use Linux because it's free (no cost). It's almost always because it's an open platform or because it has the best tools for the job they're doing (e.g. development work). So in that sense, a Linux user might be less likely to use a product if they care most about the openness of the platform.

> I don't think I've ever seen someone claim to use Linux because it's free (no cost). It's almost always because it's an open platform or because it has the best tools for the job they're doing (e.g. development work). Then those people are lying. Free is absolutely a factor for many.

True! A lot of people use Linux and the ecosystem because it's free. And that's a good thing! It's great to have this open alternative where people without economic resources can rely on solid systems without having to worry about licensing and stuff.

On the other hand, I try to pay/donate for products I use; my distro, Wikipedia, whatever.

I think this is something that those who can should do more, we usually complain about advertising and personal data mining but in the world we live on those are the things companies need to do to offer free services!

Unless we're delusional that we're gonna change the whole structure of our society, then we need to directly pay for our stuff! No matter the amount, support the main projects you rely on with cash!

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

#217

Post by dheera » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #5

Completely unrelated to the contents: Please, publishers, I beg you: walk away from medium. It's terrible for us, your readers. Set up a static blog, with a domain, go WordPress, Grav, Typo3, anything, but without stupidly large sticky header/footer and without heavy javascript . EDIT: apparently 121KB javascript is not heavy. I still believe it's an overkill for 30KB content.

> 121KB javascript is not heavy

Part of the problem is that HTML and CSS alone are horribly outdated in terms of being able to provide a modern-looking UI outside the box.

Want a slider? Unfortunately the gods at W3C/Google/etc. don't believe in a tag. Want a toggle switch? No . Want a tabbed interface? No infrastructure. Want a login button that doesn't look like it came out of an 80's discotheque? You're probably going to need Angular, Polymer, MDL or one of those frameworks, and then jQuery to deal with the framework itself. You're already looking at 70-80kb for most of this stuff alone.

Want your website to be mobile-friendly? Swipe gestures? Pull to refresh? Add another 30-40kb.

Commenting? 20kb.

Commenting with "reactive design" just to make your users feel like their comments went through before they actually went through? 50kb.

Want to gather basic statistics about your users? Add another 10kb of analytics code.

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

#218

Post by Hello71 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

bumholio wrote: post #99

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…

actually, from what I hear, this was the standard for Unix enterprise software distribution between 20 and 40 years ago. this was in large part due to the wide variation between Unixes meaning that one would otherwise have to ship several dozen or even more separate binary packages. today, proprietary software largely targets Windows only, which strongly favors binary-only distribution even for open-source software.

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

#219

Post by eberkund » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

I am optimistic about snaps even though after using them I found a lot of kinks that still need to be ironed out. But for the users downloading free software which is the main use case they are targeting first it works great. I say "for users" because wrestling with snapcraft (the command used to build snap packages) can be pretty frustrating for non-trivial programs. Cross compiling for arm was one thing that I was struggling with and ended up just doing my arm builds on a Raspberry Pi. A think many issues could be resolved by having snapcraft use it's own repo sources rather than whatever the host OS is using. Also for proprietary apps there is currently no way to have a private "store" so you are limited to installing from a .snap package using --dangerous --devmode flags and lose a lot of the benefits of using snaps in the first place (mainly automated updates).

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

#220

Post by gandreani » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #210

dpower wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. This is incredibly rude. You may not like it, but GNU/Linux was built by people for user freedom, not for proprietary email clients. Instead of using words like “fundamentalist” please instead consider that you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system and a large number of the l…

I welcome it

It's just impractical to have high quality software for every niche be built by the FOSS community. Even non-niche products (like, let's say email) leave a lot to be desired

If I could pay companies for these products I would. But I don't because they don't make products for Linux because they think we only want FOSS programs

Also, yes the creators probably don't condone proprietary software but who cares. They're not the market. The users of the OS are the market. And I want high quality software, free or not, source be dammed!