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Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

blog.hiri.com

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

#371

Post by glangdale »

mattl wrote: post #337
glangdale wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's pretty terrible if consenting adults choose to pay for software, isn't it? I love FOSS, but people like you (yes, "fundamentalists") can't deal with the idea that some forms of software are probably better as paid transactions between well-informed parties. The laughable state of open source office suites and any serious competitor to most of Adobe's products suggests that this model has its limits.

You assume I’m for open source. That’s the problem.

This isn't really germane to any point I made, but I presume this is the standard point in the discussion where you lob this particular bombshell ("I did so NOT see it coming that the guy who writes 'GNU/Linux' everywhere is a Free Software purist").

Whatever I wrote about the limits of "FOSS" software can be multiplied by a solid order of magnitude for "free only".

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

#372

Post by kevkav »

mirimir wrote: post #361
dpower wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use domains more than anything. It's not the easiest thing to determine, but I'd be pretty confident in the 50/50 scenario. But I should have said that many of the people buying with their own credit card are actually purchasing for work.

Right. I mean, how many people have personal Exchange accounts?

That is true but at a lot of people do use outlook.com / hotmail.com for their personal email.

Those are effectively Exchange accounts (MS finished migrating them to Exchange last year). So Hiri works with those too.

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

#373

Post by mikegerwitz »

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…

The fact that this comment was flagged is deeply troubling to me.

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

#374

Post by gandreani »

mattl wrote: post #237
gandreani wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 care…

There’s no reason free software can’t be paid for either. I agree that not every type of software will be built by community efforts alone, which is why many companies are contributing to free software. Out of interest, what free software would you like to see?

Oh man where do I begin?

So I can't confidently say I've tried it all but when I booted up Ubuntu within the last year it was hard to find...

    - simple email client with good html template support and conversation threading (thunderbird was meh)
    - simple pdf viewer
    - pdf editor
    - an oscilliscope app that works with those usb oscilliscopes
    - image editor (gimp is a slow nightmare to use)
    - Microsoft Office suite replacement (Open/Libre Office is also a UI nightmare)
    - A diagram app ala draw.io (Admittedly I haven't looked too hard for this one)
    - Music library organizer (Also didn't look too hard)
I guess now would also be a good time to mention apps that are great

    - Desktops shells (Gnome/KDE/Xfce)
    - VLC 
    - Firefox/Chrome
    - Package managers
    - Music players (generally bearable)

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

#375

Post by antt »

nambit wrote: post #332
antt wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? Do you see no use for proprietary software at a home linux setup? What about video games? Do you expect all video games on linux to be open source?

I'm pretty close to being completely free of proprietary software at home.

I have to use the proprietary bootloader for my newer machines and the wifi firmware the machines I haven't gotten around to replacing the wifi cards for yet.

About half of my machines are on coreboot and atheros cards.

Otherwise my user space is pure free software.

For games I play open source ones like 0ad when I have the time, which isn't often.

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

#376

Post by TuringTest »

DTND wrote: post #360
TuringTest wrote: post #65

"Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well. Some Linux blogs and Podcasts simply won’t give us the time of day. This is not a problem with the mainstream tech blogs and is a problem unique to Linux." It seems weird that this guy will try to promote his product to the Linux community and chooses to do it by insulting its user base. While not all Linux users have…

>It seems weird that this guy will try to promote his product to the Linux community and chooses to do it by insulting its user base. Please don't act like you are a representative sample of all linux users. FOSS centric guys are vocal but distributions like Ubuntu became very popular in part because they included and automatically installed proprietary wifi and GPU drivers right from their installer CD. That you fee…

Linux users that accept some closed-source code won't feel insulted. I get that.

So, it is OK to insult FOSS centric guys because they'll never be his clients?

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

#377

Post by drb91 »

brightball wrote: post #96
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.

Oh I know, there's just so many existing IMAP clients that I can't imagine paying for a desktop email/calendar client to work with Google Apps. Not to mention all the web based bits like Google Inbox, etc. The value proposition just isn't there with all of the free options already out there.

....not on linux there aren’t.

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

#378

Post by dheera »

pjmlp wrote: post #339
dheera wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You want a slider? In pure standard HTML/CSS? There are a few available as Web Components.

They don't work in all browsers, hence, piles of JS. Also if you want your buttons to match the OS you need piles of JS as well. s in Android Chrome look like Android 3.0 buttons.

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

#379

Post by RaleyField »

People that use Linux and people who frequent Linux related websites don't necessarily have a lot in common. I use Ubuntu daily, couldn't care less for what some zealots have to say on Reddit. I use it because it's the least wrong platform, not because it's FOSS.

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

#380

Post by hitekker »

TuringTest wrote: post #376
DTND wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems weird that this guy will try to promote his product to the Linux community and chooses to do it by insulting its user base. Please don't act like you are a representative sample of all linux users. FOSS centric guys are vocal but distributions like Ubuntu became very popular in part because they included and automatically installed proprietary wifi and GPU drivers right from their installer CD. That you fee…

Linux users that accept some closed-source code won't feel insulted. I get that. So, it is OK to insult FOSS centric guys because they'll never be his clients?

The FOSS guys I know have strong convictions but don't generally try to jam their views down the throat of others.

The FOSS fundamentalists, on the other hand, seem to seek the mantle of victimhood so that they can gleefully unleash their vitriol.

Thankfully, the former outnumber the latter 10-1.

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