Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

heliumhq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 71 posts

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#51

Post by j_s »

sogen wrote: post #49
adambenayoun wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually talking about finding a balance between the community edition and an enterprise edition (see Nginx plus for example). As far as I would be concerned, Forums should be open to everyone (paid and non-paid) customers and support provided by the community for the community. Paid support could be additional add-ons in the forms of email and phone support with varying level of responsiveness (a-la-SLA).

seconded, take Red Hat, Basecamp, Salesforce or CiviCRM as varying examples.

Different companies do get it right to varying degrees. Can you link to any specific incident where one of these companies resolved an issue with the open source aspect of their product that left a disgruntled user more 'gruntled'?

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#52

Post by teh_klev »

First of all let me say that I have no problem with paying for software, even closed source or otherwise. I already pay a chunk of personal money for JetBrains tools and stuff from RedGate to let me get on and do my job more efficiently, and my company does the same.

However your license condition:

"If you want to run Helium on another machine then you must first remove it from the computer you were using it on previously."

I work across a few different machines - work PC, other work PC and PC in lounge at home, VM's etc. This license condition just isn't practical or financially viable for solo developers or small dev shops who work like this. Do you actively check for multiple installs under the same license i.e. with a registration server? Altova XML Spy used to do this and it quickly got binned after the first year's license came up for renewal because they messed up the licensing records (PC crashed, couldn't de-register in-use licenses etc, hassle, hassle hassle) and we had developers working in VM's for a bunch of different projects all at once. Yes we could defeat the LAN sniffing it did to find out if two copies of the XML Spy were running with the same license, but it was too much effort and we resented having to do this - despite each dev being properly licensed.

Vendors such as JetBrains and RedGate license the software to me/company for use by a single developer/user, I don't have restrictions such as "you must first remove it from the computer you were using it on previously".

I/we are happy to buy licenses for each developer on our team "using" the software, but not for each and every VM or dev env a single developer is working in. As such I haven't bothered to let my colleagues know about this tool which sounds pretty cool, nor have I tried to download it (forcing me to part with contact details to try something really puts me off).

I understand that you have to eat and pay the rent, but even for a company like ours, that has a fairly generous budget for development tools, this type of "per-installed machine" license is considered hostile for the type of tool being sold.

I'm generally not a negative person when it comes to "Show HN" and I truly appreciate the efforts people put into their projects whether it be for a paid-for product or showing off some hacks or tricks, but your license....it frustrates me.

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#53

Post by j_s »

adambenayoun wrote: post #48
j_s wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is super-tough to find a balance... take for example the Sencha/ExtJS community where there are problems like a paid support forum that free users can't access even when their own posts are moved there after being reclassified as feature requests / bugs: http://www.sencha.com/forum/showthread.php?269640-Why-the-Pr... There are more examples in that forum demonstrating that while trying to appease those in need of…

I was actually talking about finding a balance between the community edition and an enterprise edition (see Nginx plus for example). As far as I would be concerned, Forums should be open to everyone (paid and non-paid) customers and support provided by the community for the community. Paid support could be additional add-ons in the forms of email and phone support with varying level of responsiveness (a-la-SLA).

FWIW, it's usually pretty easy to find examples of people complaining when companies split up their functionality, especially when they are moving the other way (from open source to commercial):

We should ditch NGINX (http://www.hipyoungstartup.com/2013/11/we-should-ditch-nginx... )

discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799029

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#54

Post by sogen »

j_s wrote: post #51
sogen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seconded, take Red Hat, Basecamp, Salesforce or CiviCRM as varying examples.

Different companies do get it right to varying degrees. Can you link to any specific incident where one of these companies resolved an issue with the open source aspect of their product that left a disgruntled user more 'gruntled'?

Paid Memberships Pro offers basic support freely, and bigger issues are only available to members.

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#55

Post by mherrmann »

teh_klev wrote: post #52

First of all let me say that I have no problem with paying for software, even closed source or otherwise. I already pay a chunk of personal money for JetBrains tools and stuff from RedGate to let me get on and do my job more efficiently, and my company does the same. However your license condition: "If you want to run Helium on another machine then you must first remove it from the computer you were using it on previ…

I see. I'm very sorry to hear that you are so frustrated with the licensing scheme. We should also offer "floating" licenses which are not tied to a particular machine. Would that be OK for your needs?

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#56

Post by adambenayoun »

j_s wrote: post #53
adambenayoun wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually talking about finding a balance between the community edition and an enterprise edition (see Nginx plus for example). As far as I would be concerned, Forums should be open to everyone (paid and non-paid) customers and support provided by the community for the community. Paid support could be additional add-ons in the forms of email and phone support with varying level of responsiveness (a-la-SLA).

FWIW, it's usually pretty easy to find examples of people complaining when companies split up their functionality, especially when they are moving the other way (from open source to commercial): We should ditch NGINX ( http://www.hipyoungstartup.com/2013/11/we-should-ditch-nginx... ) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799029

People will always complain - that doesn't mean the company aren't successful at what they're doing. I've been using nginx for a very long time and started when their docs were in russian and hardly translated into english - I applaud them for doing that step and creating nginx plus - I suspect that in the future I will need/want to pay them a license fee.

If my company is creating lot of value and part of that value is enabled by software I use - I think it's only natural that I pay back some of the proceeds to support the software I use, especially if in the process I'm getting more features and better support.

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#57

Post by mherrmann »

hyp0 wrote: post #38
mherrmann wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's interesting and that it is a problem. You could see from mapleoin's comment that closed source software is not looked at favorably. I can see why, but as I said if we want to sustain full-time development of this project, we need an income. One approach that's often used with open source projects is to develop the software for free and then charge for consulting. But, with a tool such as Helium that…

First off, excellent idea. It seems simple and straightforward to automate web site interaction, especially for those lacking APIs (e.g. my stoneage bank, to check for telegraphic transfer payments). But I'm torn. On the one hand, I support developers getting paid for creating tools/libraries (instead of working on in-house software; or consumer/business startups). I think it's better for the world. It's also how I'v…

Interesting post full of ideas - many thanks. I agree that it would be great for us to be able to get the best of both worlds - paying business customers and (probably) non-paying users that supply the google-juice, as you so aptly put it. Maybe we can offer a "Social license" that allows people to use Helium for free if they tweet about it.

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#58

Post by nfoz »

moconnor wrote: post #18
mherrmann wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We quit our daytime jobs to work on this project and have to live off something... Maybe you have a suggestion as to what we could do to allow us to sustain our development in another way?

This is a really interesting problem. There's the expectation - and desire - for all software, particularly development tools, to be open source. This seems to make it harder for independent developers to devote time to creating great tools. Is the future of software tools in the side-effects of teams at large organizations open sourcing things they needed to solve their own problems?

Software has always been set back by an absense of business models that support the development of high-quality software. Either it takes draconian copyright (which severely limits the usefulness of the software), DRM/no reverse-engineering licenses, or advertisement/3rd-party tracking, or some other braindamaged scheme.

The future I see is in crowdfunding development up-front. It takes a social change alongside the development of technology to facilitate that (improved payment processing would help; lowering transaction fees and allowing micropayments, etc.). We're getting there, but it's really tough.

I don't have a good answer. But copyright and license agreements aren't it.

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#59

Post by mherrmann »

hipsters_unite wrote: post #34
mherrmann wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several things. I claim it's still more high level than Capybara. And it's available for languages other than Ruby. Right now, you can download it for Python. But we'll also release bindings for (hopefully all) languages supported by Selenium.

Okay, thanks. Is this aimed at developers then, rather than say the product team?

I would say it's aimed at anyone willing to do light programming / scripting. I don't think a particular role within a company precludes this. (Sorry for the late reply by the way, I lost track among all the comments here.)

Re: Show HN: Helium - Simple web automation

#60

Post by mherrmann »

devspade wrote: post #36
mherrmann wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. It can't do anything that Selenium can't, but it's a lot easier to work with. It's like developing in Assembler vs developing in C: Both are equally powerful in what they can achieve, but the former is much more technical to use than the latter. The analogy extends further: We were invited to write an article about Helium in the December issue of Professional Tester (professionaltester.com) in which we…

Interesting. We have a ton of work put into Selenium already so switching costs would be rather high for our team. But probably worth keeping an eye on this project. You're going to have some big obstacles to overcome trying to get people to pay for this versus using Selenium.

Just would like to comment that you wouldn't have to "switch" completely. Helium is fully interoperable with Selenium, that is, you can freely mix calls to Helium to calls with Selenium. So in your case, you could add the Helium library to your project and when you extend or maintain it, at every step, choose whether you want to perform a particular step with Helium or Selenium.
Post reply on HN