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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

#291

Post by gsich »

wendy0x2 wrote: post #229
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…

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.

That and the giant clusterfuck that the Linux desktop is. Gnome 3 has no desktop icons anymore per default, not even minimize, maximize buttons. It does not end there.

A major hassle is that sometimes the GUI is showing something different then what is configured. Especially in networking. I configure an IP address, I want it to show in the GUI. I don't care if it's configured via the shell.

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

#292

Post by gsich »

mattl wrote: post #251
pjmlp wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the GNU/Linux desktop stuff is GNOME, and a lot of GNOME developers work at Red Hat, but not exclusively. If you want to work on free software desktop applications, I would consider working at a company like that. A lot of desktop software is commodity stuff — mail clients, office suites, browsers, photo editing and the like. But there are some areas where we need to be better, such as video editing.

This is essentially a byproduct of Red Hat selling stuff. Just take Filezilla, people don't donate, so the author used some shady stuff. Or look at gnupg.

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

#293

Post by gsich »

wendy0x2 wrote: post #255
mattl wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, please don’t conflate paid software with proprietary software. You can pay for either, but only proprietary software is the issue.

A company can't survive on paid oss (gnu/gpl). The license allows anyone to purchase it and then go ahead and give it out for free, which would happen in short order. Support doesn't work for many small companies, because you just don't have the manpower, so proprietary software is necessary.

Also, many "small" programs don't require support because they are very simple to use.

You can probably make money by selling Windows binaries of OSS software. See ntopng, where compiling on Windows is not that straight forward as compared to Linux.

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

#294

Post by antt »

wendy0x2 wrote: post #255
mattl wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, please don’t conflate paid software with proprietary software. You can pay for either, but only proprietary software is the issue.

A company can't survive on paid oss (gnu/gpl). The license allows anyone to purchase it and then go ahead and give it out for free, which would happen in short order. Support doesn't work for many small companies, because you just don't have the manpower, so proprietary software is necessary.

Most companies don't survive on selling software anymore either. Look at Adobe. You can't buy their products, you just rent them.

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

#295

Post by gsich »

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.

30KB for content? I count around 8000 characters.

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

#296

Post by antt »

kevkav wrote: post #127
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #60

I think this piece (along with many, many others in the genre) is unduly discounting the practical implications of a proprietary binary for users, preferring to blame a preference for open source solely on a "fundamentalist FOSS mentality". For example, my next GPU is going to be a Radeon largely because I'm tired of the weird issues that come with installing/updating proprietary drivers, the lack of transparency aro…

The intention of the article was in no an attack on the "FOSS mentality". FOSS is a reality and is a great thing! The point that was being made, was that promoting paid linux applications is a challenge. And that that challenge becomes more difficult because we need to operate in an environment where many of the biggest publications do not want to know anything about non-FOSS apps.

Then why kick a hornets nests?

As others have noted Linux for home and Linux for work are two completely different things.

At work I use RHEL 7, packages 5 years out of date, don't have access to build tools to incorporate patches myself and a million and one other things I would never tolerate at home. Throwing some more money after a program that lets me not touch outlook sounds like a great idea.

At home I do none of the above things I can't think of a reason why I would ever touch a binary blob.

There are plenty of people who feel the same. Don't come into a hobbyist environment selling corporate solutions expecting a warm welcome. Instead of /r/linux go to /r/sysadmin or some such.

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

#297

Post by UncleEntity »

mitchty wrote: post #98
olalonde wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that I only ever hear those complaints on HN and never elsewhere... Are you all still using Pentium 3 PCs and 56k modems?

Try using a "modern" site on a spotty 2g connection. Then realize that level of a connection is more common than you think. You never hear it elsewhere because those users just don't use your site, because they can't.

Yep, that's been my life for a couple weeks when I went over my "unlimited data" cap and have been stuck in 2g land.

The modern interwebs is a bloated mess...1 minute plus loading times is more common than not.

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

#298

Post by jest3r1 »

peterwwillis wrote: post #266
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…

The decision to choose a "mail client" (really a "groupware system") is a complex process in most cases. MS Office is the default because it does everything, and it works on the top two platforms. Google is sort of competing in this space, but it's nowhere near MS's feature set, customer/business service, and compatibility. The people buying your product are not integrating it into their business case because your pr…

A Linux niche I have had success selling is "privacy". The Linux crowd, especially decision makers in businesses that run Linux somewhere, are very privacy aware. It's a good differentiator. And people will pay for better privacy, especially considering the options.

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

#299

Post by mjevans »

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.

I feel similarly but not quite 100%.

For the core things the basic, inter-operable, standard should be fully open and free. This includes protocols, data formats, reference applications/servers/clients and anything similar.

A user should not need to pay to communicate. This is a natural right and one of the cornerstones of a free society.

However I don't mind proprietary products as OPTIONS that allow someone to do the above better or more effectively (while still following open standards for external APIs!), or for 'toy' tasks like games or fun. That's a premium feature or recreational extra.

For the logical retort about who should be funding the development and maintenance of the core items? In some cases (hardware APIs) manufacturers might want to form standards bodies (E.G. Khronos maintains OpenGL and Vulkan) and provide open standards. In other (most) cases governments maintaining civil infrastructure should contribute. I would love if every university had a course where existing code repos were examined by students for completeness and safety and the students actually signed off on their reviews and maybe even submitted patches (or at least bugs if the answer isn't obvious/requires architectural changes) for flaws.

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

#300

Post by btschaegg »

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.

Are we talking about the client that sent the plaintext for encrypted emails along for half a year?

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