Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

blog.hiri.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 395 posts

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

#221

Post by jerguismi »

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…

If you consider "fundamentalist" a rude adjective to descibe the said behaviour, what would be a better adjective then?

I don't have anything against that kind of attitude, it's great and I approve those guys though I myself also like to buy software. "Fundamentalism" IMO describes it pretty well and I don't see the negative connotation.

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

#222

Post by wruza »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #116
wruza wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1280x800 means you can have ad blocker at least (or tampermonkey). Block bottom bar and make header scrollable for this site once. Phones lack this, sadly.

Why should people be expected to install an ad blocker and add a load of custom rules just to make a specific website usable? In what world is that reasonable?

IRL you can choose worlds only by denying possibilities, afaict. In a world where adblock is not an option you have to make a big change or tolerate.

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

#223

Post by nine_k »

zaarn wrote: post #186
nine_k wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to disagree. You may see GNU folks as crackpots, but in many aspects they are right, for business reasons. I have an increasingly hard time to admit in my core stack anything that is not open-source (even if not free-as-in-freedom). Commercial offerings come and go, change their terms, etc. They can do something that goes contrary to my interests, and I have no recourse, and nobody has. This is on the top of p…

Being able to look at the source and troubleshoot it is not mutually exclusive to a product being proprietary (ie, source available would give you this). There is also plenty of business I know that do everything in their power to ensure that if they go away the customer isn't left helpless (this is very popular in some parts of industrial engineering where it's common sense to hand over the blue print along with a s…

Sure, if you're a big enough customer, you can have access to (relevant parts of) source code, and various forms of preferential treatment. I've seen his firsthand. This is the norm with big vendors that are on the market for many decades, and not going anywhere (e.g. Microsoft).

If you are a smaller fish, you have fewer of these options, because they just cost money.

Of course it's often cost-effective to quickly start using a piece of commercial software or SaaS, e.g. Slack or Gmail, as opposed to hosting your own chat or email with opensource solutions. As with any software where you put your important data, you need to know your way out, and a way to transfer these data to different software / SaaS. With email, it's reasonably easy; don't know about Slack. With open-source solutions it's usually reasonably easy, too, and it's easier to find, or at least to produce, a migration tool.

In some cases, there's just no free alternative; e.g. if you are writing a PC game, you can't realistically stay away from Windows.

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

#224

Post by detaro »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #189
detaro wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Caddy mess had a bunch of factors complicating it, and isn't a good comparison. E.g. they promoted themselves as an easy and powerful solution for people that aren't really sysadmin/server types, and then hurt that exact demographic by from one day to the other requiring them to either pay a not-insignificant amount of money or learn how to compile a product they choose because it's really easy themselves…

I cannot see someone trying to get paid for their work as a "bait and switch".

Then see it only as "surprising and major change, negating the previous unique selling point, makes people unhappy".

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

#225

Post by tiatia123 »

Well, I would be more than happy to buy a decent Linux IMAP client.

1. I never heard about your product 2. Can I use it as a regular IMAP client?

I am waiting for a linux version of this:

https://www.ivelope.com/invite/RunItUpTheFlagpoleHackerSeaCh...

(shitty invitation link that gets me ahead in the queue)

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

#226

Post by ssdd »

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 completely agree. There are very few paid software for which we don't already have a FLOSS software that can compete with it. Linux users are normally good at finding FLOSS alternatives to paid softwares.

Another thing that author can do is to compare Linux home users sales results with Windows home users for any of their product that is available for both platforms. Sales would be similar as long as Linux and Windows software marketplace for that area is same.

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

#227

Post by compuguy »

__sr__ wrote: post #155
jtchang wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that Google IMAP could mean Google Apps compatibility. And a good number of orgs use Google Apps.

Doesn’t Google Apps support MS Exchange on the server? The paid one, that is? I remember there was a lot of hue and cry over Google dropping MS Exchange option for free Gmail around the same time when Windows Phone 8 launched. But at the same time, Google said they would continue to offer Exchange for paid accounts. Has that changed?

It supports ActiveSync, to my knowledge.

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

#228

Post by windows_tips »

jerguismi wrote: post #221
mattl wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you consider "fundamentalist" a rude adjective to descibe the said behaviour, what would be a better adjective then? I don't have anything against that kind of attitude, it's great and I approve those guys though I myself also like to buy software. "Fundamentalism" IMO describes it pretty well and I don't see the negative connotation.

"fundamentalist" is used as a slur by some people (c.f. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fundamentali...). The slur assumes things that don't exist in the word itself, so it's not obvious the word incorporates them.

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

#229

Post by wendy0x2 »

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…

This isn't rude at all. He was describing a situation in the Linux community where a large number of users have an aversion to paid software.

It's a real problem and one of the main reason osx was able to eclipse desktop software usage on linux in such a short amount of time.

Responses like yours are the real problem.

If you want linux desktop software to grow, there needs to be room for proprietary software.

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

#230

Post by nothis »

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.

I hate the way Medium articles load images. They always stop loading with these ugly, blurry placeholder images everywhere. I bet the JavaScript bloat even undoes the savings in loading time.
Post reply on HN