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Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

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

#241

Post by shkkmo »

ssdd wrote: post #226
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 Wind…

I tried and failed to find a quality git gui for linux, (coming from SourceTree on OSX). I tried a number and they either had awful UI, lacked functionality, or were too buggy.

In the end I ended up paying for a license to GitKraken and am quite happy.

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

#242

Post by pmlnr »

dheera wrote: post #217
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 g…

What are you talking about? This is a static, column-like entry.

Why would a static content need pull-to-refresh? Or comments? Or a slider?

Mobile-friendly is perfectly fine with CSS resolution rules. Or with sticking to the basics and letting content flow within boundaries.

Basic analytics can be done on server side, or, by sending a single request with resolution, etc. as POST or GET params, or even by parsing web server logs. It won't give you that much, but it will give you basics for certain. (See awstats and webalizer from the old days.)

Don't overcomplicate things, none of what you're talking about is needed for an article.

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

#243

Post by pjmlp »

mattl wrote: post #236
wendy0x2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t want “Linux desktop software” to grow. I want computer users to have zero-proprietary software. The problem with thinking of GNU/Linux in the same way as Windows and Mac OS X is that it assumes a world where proprietary software is the norm, or is okay. I believe that is isn’t okay, and that it is harmful.

Harmful is wanting to be paid for their work while expecting others to give their work for free.

It is plain impossible to live from selling desktop software with source code available, without having others in the first week come around and re-bundle it, Sourceforge style.

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

#244

Post by mattl »

throwaway23948 wrote: post #234
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…

How is telling people what is good for them, like you just did, not fundamentalism? Almost every server and smart phone install of Linux uses proprietary software, that is clearly part of how people wants to use it. You yourself are communicating through many layers of proprietary software right now. This is exactly why people don't want to do open source. Because increasingly it isn't about culture, doing it better…

I’m not telling people what is good for them. I’m describing the reasons for the creation of the GNU/Linux operating system.

What proprietary software is being used on servers? I believe most Android users don’t know about user freedom, and those that do would greatly prefer a more generic, “pure” Android experience vs the poor quality applications installed by default on most non-Google phones.

You’re confusing the initial ideas that were attributed to open source — seperating the software from the campaign for user freedom — with the free software community. Open source and free software are different movements with common results. The GNU/Linux operating system was built long before open source was a thing, and those founding principles of user freedom are attacked by proprietary software.

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

#245

Post by slrz »

Nursie wrote: post #165
LarryL wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is there such a hard dichotomy between "commercial - binary blob" and open source? I see at least 2 reasons. 1) Mindset (and ignorance) I've worked in big telecom companies, in their technical teams, which means people who know about programming in big (BIG/HUGE) projects. Even there, many of their -very- experienced tech people were AFRAID of anything open-source. They were terrified that using anything that h…

There's a third issue - support. I worked for a place about 15 years ago which was trying desperately to retire its previous flagship product in favour of the new version. The new version was better written and more scalable, but the major value for them was that they had made a big mistake with the old one - The gave away source code and allowed customers to customise the software, but they still honoured support co…

No sensible person is going to be mad with you for asking them to reproduce their issue without local customizations applied if they want you to help them with it.

Write it into your support contracts. Maybe offer smarter customers to review and sign off on their modifications in exchange for a reasonable fee.

These problems can be solved.

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

#246

Post by dogma1138 »

biktor_gj wrote: post #235
dogma1138 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would say it is one of the most _feature complete_ email client, but I don't think it is a good email software. I've seen it crash too many times at the worst possible timings, and, latest updates have rendered almost unusable without patching on Mac for Exchange enterprise users (I even had to make a script to disable Outlook autodiscover on all our corporate macs because from 16.12 version and up it started tryin…

Office for Mac has been a shitshow for years, either use 365 online or use the windows one through parallels et al.

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

#247

Post by hardly_a_mirage »

windows_tips wrote: post #228
jerguismi wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the difference between the slurred fundamentalist (connoting a terrorist-like figure) and a tech fundamentalist is objectively clear.

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

#248

Post by oblio »

mattl wrote: post #236
wendy0x2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t want “Linux desktop software” to grow. I want computer users to have zero-proprietary software. The problem with thinking of GNU/Linux in the same way as Windows and Mac OS X is that it assumes a world where proprietary software is the norm, or is okay. I believe that is isn’t okay, and that it is harmful.

Good luck to that, reality doesn't seem to agree with you. The future seems firmly in the camp of a mix of FOSS with proprietary.

The most popular OSes are proprietary:

* Android (almost useless without the Google stuff, plus 99% of Android apps are unfortunately proprietary)

* Windows

* MacOS (I know about Darwin, everyone uses MacOS for the proprietary integration bits)

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

#249

Post by s73v3r_ »

detaro wrote: post #224
s73v3r_ wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I can't really see it as that, either. The source is still open, it's free to check out and compile.

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

#250

Post by oblio »

__sr__ wrote: post #158
pmlnr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Chrome is the only mainstream browser without a decent reading mode these days — because doesn’t want people hiding advertisements. One of the reasons I prefer not to use it. And enabling reader mode doesn’t need any power user skills, does it?

> Chrome is the only mainstream browser

It "only" has 70%+ of the browser market share, and growing.

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