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

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

#51

Post by pmlnr » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:08 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

For power users, this is an option, but the truth is: this supposed to be and should be fixed on the publisher side.

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

#52

Post by lloydde » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

> Turns out there aren’t a lot of email clients for Linux users that work with Exchange / Office 365

Has Linux on the desktop really fallen so far in the last years? When did the decay really set in?

How does open source friendly Microsoft not see Linux email clients support falling behind at least as a problem in MS documenting its APIs, if not an opportunity to participate in the major open source clients and influence and attract developers?

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

#53

Post by theoh » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #11

skrowl wrote: post #7

I'd imagine for most Linux users (not all, of course) that they're not interested in paid proprietary products, which is why they chose Linux in the first place.

There is little to no evidence of this. I don't think I've ever seen someone claim to use Linux because it's free (no cost). It's almost always because it's an open platform or because it has the best tools for the job they're doing (e.g. development work). So in that sense, a Linux user might be less likely to use a product if they care most about the openness of the platform.

If you compare "getting into Linux" with "getting into Adobe CS" then I think the cost does have an effect. For example I'm interested in digging into the functionality offered by both, but I've never felt that I could justify the cost of the Adobe tools. So the fact that Linux is free was a strong influence.

Curious people could speculatively purchase a lot of things, books for example; cost is often, naturally, a constraint.

In the days when Netscape Navigator was a closed-source binary blob on Linux, everyone ran it anyway (it was free). It was the only way to get the functionality.

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

#54

Post by sv12l » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

"First stop, reddit" Dont go to reddit for market research. You will only find extreem views on reddit. They are the younger crowd. Try the ubuntu or mint forums if you want to talk to average linux users. I myself would pay for such an email client because no good foss one exists atm. But i find it very odd that such basic software isnt yet free. I dont like the idea of having my email handled by propietary software…

Agree, esp avoid /r/linux, they are not suitably representative of larger Linux community out there.

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

#55

Post by nailer » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

As an old school Linux desktop person from back in the day: whatever happened to Evolution? The whole reason it was created was to sell an Exchange client plugin.

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

#56

Post by makmanalp » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

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.

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

#57

Post by nailer » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #39

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.

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?

No some of us use smartphones and travel to places where 3G connections are the only thing available.

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

#58

Post by Klover » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

"First stop, reddit" Dont go to reddit for market research. You will only find extreem views on reddit. They are the younger crowd. Try the ubuntu or mint forums if you want to talk to average linux users. I myself would pay for such an email client because no good foss one exists atm. But i find it very odd that such basic software isnt yet free. I dont like the idea of having my email handled by propietary software…

While I was typing my question at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17592842 you already answered it here. Thanks!

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

#59

Post by megaman22 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:12 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #36

scns wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at "make medium readable again", a plugin for firefox and chrome. Source is on github, could not paste the link because i am on mobile.

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

Fortunately, you can use user stylesheets to fix some of this crap. Holding your breath waiting for somebody else, particularly publishers, to fix it for you is a good recipe for asphyxiation.

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

#60

Post by 0xcde4c3db » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 2:12 PM UTC

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 around bug reports, and the general disconnects with the rest of the FOSS ecosystem.

The specific issues for applications are different, but there are parallels. The key thing is that FOSS on Linux isn't just an ideology, it's also an ecosystem and a set of norms and practices. When you ship a proprietary product, users have to weigh the cost of opting out of all of that, not just the sticker price. Nobody with any sense would ship a Windows package solely as source code and expect Windows users to love it. I can't imagine anyone blaming a weak reception of such a product on a "fundamentalist proprietary blob mentality". But when they similarly sidestep standard practices on Linux, any friction is almost reflexively attributed to the users being unreasonable.