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

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

#281

Post by toopsss » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #270

amyjess wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux was built by people for user freedom > not welcomed by the creators of the operating system No, it wasn't. Linux was created because Linus Torvalds was in love with the OS running on the VAX at his university and wanted something just like it that he can run on his desktop at home. > you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system The DFSG and the OSD both prohibit discrim…

Linux is a kernel. GNU is an operating system, and so GNU/Linux is what most people are actually using. The DFSG and OSD are criteria for evaluating free and open source software and more specifically their licensing terms. The discrimination against fields of endeavor means you can’t make a license that says “the government can’t use my software” or “no military use” and call it free software or open source software…

My field of endeavor involves running non-free software. So which is it? Is it non-discrimatory or am I doing something against the creators wishes?

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

#282

Post by ben509 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:03 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.

> You aren’t going to out Office Microsoft that is just a fools errand.

Having used Outlook for a while, even on Windows, I'm shocked that people describe Outlook as good.

It may be the least worst, but Outlook is, being generous, a very mediocre piece of software. That's Microsoft's strategy in a nutshell: be Good Enough for a very large audience.

> Also by essentially building a client for Exchange you are putting your product at the mercy of Microsoft that can change their APIs and protocol on a whim and even block 3rd party clients with their EULA all together.

That used to be true, but they're far more constrained by their installed base these days.

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

#283

Post by s73v3r_ » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

merb wrote: post #264

shkkmo wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

basically using a gui for git is not a good practice. most stuff is cluttered together and hard to find. even in sourcetree, stuff that is important is just not good. (I used sourcetree heavily in the past) I moved on from graphical git clients and I'm now way more happy and more productive on the cli. the only thing which I would miss on linux is a graphical merge tool, that is as good as kaleidoscope even on window…

"basically using a gui for git is not a good practice. "

That is absolutely silly and completely false. I use SourceTree every day and have no issues whatsoever. I'm just as productive as anyone on the CLI, as 95% of actions are the basic pull/commit/push type stuff.

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

#284

Post by mattl » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

toopsss wrote: post #281

mattl wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is a kernel. GNU is an operating system, and so GNU/Linux is what most people are actually using. The DFSG and OSD are criteria for evaluating free and open source software and more specifically their licensing terms. The discrimination against fields of endeavor means you can’t make a license that says “the government can’t use my software” or “no military use” and call it free software or open source software…

My field of endeavor involves running non-free software. So which is it? Is it non-discrimatory or am I doing something against the creators wishes?

Your field of endeavor has nothing to do with a free software license. A piece of free software cannot say nobody using proprietary software cannot use it, however proprietary software is against the wishes of the original developers of what is best described as GNU/Linux.

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

#285

Post by alexnewman » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

I just don't buy it. I'd pay you if you opened your komono and had a github. I just can't trust a tiny startup like you with my email.

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

#286

Post by CM30 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

makmanalp wrote: post #56

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 also loved that era of blogs, but unless the distribution problem is solved, we're probably never going back. Self-hosted personal blogs end up mostly being ghost towns these days unless you get somewhat famous. Medium on the other hand gets your foot in the door and draws your niche crowd and conversations for you with much less effort.

I think the whole Medium discoverability thing used to be a lot better in the olden days than now. Then, Medium had some sort of standards for who could join and what they could post about, and it tended to bring up decent content for people visiting. Nowadays?

Medium literally does feel like YouTube, in that unless you've got an established audience already finding readers is kind of tricky. Read the Daily Digest they have and note down how many people there are 'average joes' without a large following compared to internet 'influencers' and 'social media celebrities'.

And now they've got the paid content thing, it's only gotten even worse from there. Now it feels like the site's trying to force paid content down everyone's throat, and completely ignores the free stuff when deciding what to feature or promote. Hell, sometimes I've had them said emails almost entirely consisting of links to paid articles from publications I don't read.

It's definitely like YouTube, but it's less like the YouTube of yore and more like the YouTube of today, a wannabe broadcast TV esque network that pushes celebrities front and centre and does very little to promote lesser known creators.

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

#287

Post by CM30 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

gadders wrote: post #44

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.

Danr4 wrote a javascript bookmarklet that gets rid those stupid fixed elements [1]. He posted it on here before. It certainly makes those sites more bearable. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16616682

Interesting solution, but the number of sites using fixed menus (or ones that fix once you've scrolled a certain amount) may make it risky to use for your average user. And quite a few sites with fixed menus are also probably the ones the user will most likely want to use this script on due to the annoying fixed ads and nagbars...

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

#288

Post by pmlnr » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #185

ekianjo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do users have to do something to fix something that needs to be fixed by publishers?

Most users don't see this as something that needs to be "fixed". They're fine with it. This is only for those that don't like the stylistic choices made.

> They're fine with it

This statements needs data. "Fine" with it and "accepted defeat" or "isn't aware it could be different" are not synonyms.

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

#289

Post by cup-of-tea » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #2

Quite a neat insight and somewhat confirming what I think personally; Linux users largely don't use Linux for FLOSS reasons. People who do use Linux for FLOSS reasons are however rather loud. I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Doing it right largely involves "don't treat the customer as a walking…

I think they do even if they don't know it. After all, GNU/Linux is the way it is because it is FLOSS. You might just as well say people don't use cars because of the wheels.

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

#290

Post by awill » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

ndarwincorn wrote: post #269

alkonaut wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Linu…

>there is no Linux outlook With the GH aquisition I'll be shocked if we don't see most of MS's desktop stuff, including Office, move to Electron/WebAssembly in the next few years.

Outlook is already a bloated beast. Moving it to Electron would be a disaster. I can't see it happening. Maybe a 'lite' version of outlook, but not the version enterprises use.