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Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

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Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#81

Post by Vegenoid »

x0x0 wrote: post #45
Vegenoid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app. A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.

Or they're optimizing for not being a sysadmin, which some people can't do and even some of the people who can find to be very ungratifying work. For a project that runs on this person's enthusiasm, that seems not crazy. It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3 bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test that all once a month, et…

Yes, if you don't want to do that work and are happy to pay someone else to take care of it, then that is great. But if you like making free web apps, relying on a PaaS will get expensive.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#82

Post by immibis »

carlosjobim wrote: post #31
aniviacat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind! We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products). > being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations. edit: remved anecdote The cost of living…

> We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products). That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.

That's why I make all my software AGPL now.

I haven't published any software at all recently. But if I did (anything non-trivial), it would be AGPL. Or even SSPL.

Permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Unlicense, public domain, etc) is a scam to make you work for companies for free - if your software is worth anything to them, that is. They told developers they should use MIT licenses so more people would use their software. That's true. They didn't ask whether that was a good thing.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#83

Post by immibis »

x0x0 wrote: post #45
Vegenoid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app. A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.

Or they're optimizing for not being a sysadmin, which some people can't do and even some of the people who can find to be very ungratifying work. For a project that runs on this person's enthusiasm, that seems not crazy. It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3 bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test that all once a month, et…

If you become a sysadmin, not only do you save $100 per month but you can also add it to your CV.

DHH (Rails founder) thinks you should dare to connect a server to the internet: https://world.hey.com/dhh/dare-to-connect-a-server-to-the-in...

(I already submitted this once, but given the discussion here, I think it's worth posting again, if my rate limit allows it)

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#85

Post by sam0x17 »

weinzierl wrote: post #67

The pay only what you use model is nice when your revenue also scales with use. For my projects I wish there were plans with higher fixed cost and risk only in availability and not in cost.

The only downside with that I've found is people and orgs tend to overestimate their future usage of X across the board, so profits rarely match expectations with pay-as-you-go, and tier-based pricing will easily overcome you by capturing more $$ from the market. Some notable exceptions are things like file storage where people tend to underestimate what they will need I find.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#86

Post by immibis »

horsawlarway wrote: post #20
ndriscoll wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something). Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but th…

So many people don't seem to understand how efficient modern machines are. As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)... I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data. I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is ma…

As DHH said somewhere, it's incredible that the modern cloud stack has managed to get PROGRAMMERS to be scared of COMPUTERS. Seriously, what's with that? That shouldn't even be possible?

If you can understand programming, you can understand Linux. Might take a while to be really confident, but do you need incredible confidence when you have backups? :)

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#87

Post by j45 »

LVB wrote: post #74

I'm always curious what folks use for their database for things like this. Even though I like SQLite--a lot--my preference has become that the app is generally separate and mostly stateless. Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries. Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed using neon.tech more than I expe…

It's trivial to run mysql (or Perforce variant) or Postgres, with some minor caching for simple apps.

I'm not sure what you are hitting that would go past the capacity of a small vps.

Independent VPs for DB make sense, but if the requests are reasonably cached, you can get away with it (and beef up the backups) especially if it's something non-critical.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#88

Post by carlosjobim »

aniviacat wrote: post #71
carlosjobim wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products). That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.

When I write open source libraries I consider the ones benefitting to be the general public. Even if my libraries were used only by mega corporations (which they aren't) there would still be a benefit to the public: If companies have lower cost, they will charge lower prices, benefitting customers / the general public. (And yes, they will lower prices. Most markets are not monopolies.)

Open source never benefits the general public, because open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public.

Instead, open source mainly benefits other developers. But at the end of the chain there has to be a product that is of use for non-developers. Because developing isn't for developments sake. And the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made.

If FOSS people made complete products which were end user friendly, I'd buy the argument of benefitting the general public.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#89

Post by ryandrake »

immibis wrote: post #83
x0x0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they're optimizing for not being a sysadmin, which some people can't do and even some of the people who can find to be very ungratifying work. For a project that runs on this person's enthusiasm, that seems not crazy. It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3 bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test that all once a month, et…

If you become a sysadmin, not only do you save $100 per month but you can also add it to your CV. DHH (Rails founder) thinks you should dare to connect a server to the internet: https://world.hey.com/dhh/dare-to-connect-a-server-to-the-in... (I already submitted this once, but given the discussion here, I think it's worth posting again, if my rate limit allows it)

> The merchants of complexity thrive when they can scare you into believing that even the simplest things are too dangerous to even attempt by yourself these days.

Awesome first sentence! I know I'm going to agree with the article just by that. This applies to so many things in life, too. We're been taught that so many things people routinely did in the past are now scary and impossible.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#90

Post by consteval »

Vegenoid wrote: post #30
diggan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app. I'm not sure, I'm also "new generation of devs" I suppose, cloud had just entered the beginning of the hype cycle when I started out professionally. Most companies/individuals at that point were pushing for "everything cloud" bu…

Certainly, I just mean that we are hitting a point where there can be professional devs, with multiple years of experience at tech companies successfully building software, who have only ever known and worked with a PaaS to deploy an app.

It's frustrating too because deployment technologies and tools continue to get better and better. It's never been easier to deploy an application + database to some arbitrary computer. You can do it declaratively, no SSH, no random shell scripts, no suspicious fiddling.

Also, sidenote: but for small stuff you can just deploy in your home. I've done it before. It's really not that scary, and odds are you have a computer laying around. The only "spooky" part is relying on my ISP router. I don't trust that thing, but that can be fixed.

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