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

spliit.app

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

#91

Post by carlosjobim »

quesera wrote: post #73
carlosjobim wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not that guy, I'm against open source and free loading. Why would multi million dollar CEOs give anything to FOSS programmers when they're developing their crucial infrastructure for free? Work for free for huge companies so they can make billion dollar profits while at the same time demanding unionization. Refusing to sell your work to consumers who are willing to pay, yet happy to provide free tech support to f…

> What's the logic? Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our excess production with the world. Like any other good work, it does not require acknowledgement or reciprocation, and the benefits are not part of a zero-sum economy where the giver is harmed by any action of the receiver. You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS. Why does it offend you so much that other people prioritize forms of com…

> You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS.

That's true, I'm the chief anti-OSS crusader on HN and online. I'll give it a rest after this thread, to breathe and give all a chance to recover strength.

> Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our excess production with the world.

Selling those things is still sharing with the world. Most paid software is cheap to purchase.

If FOSS was an eco system where end users had the common(?) courtesy to donate just a little bit to at least one of the projects they use, then I'd have nothing to say. But whenever I use any FOSS code and donate, I usually find myself alone with two or three other people who have donated.

Unlike most other professions, programming is something most people start with as a hobby in young years. So maybe they don't value their own hard work and effort, even though they've matured past the young hobbyist phase? And then they get misguided by open source activists to labour for free.

A young artist who publishes their songs online for free in the hopes of becoming famous, will still retain copyright on those works. No record label can come around and start selling those songs without even letting the artist know. Much less stealing and selling the songs of a well-established artist if he/she decides to release music for free.

I just don't like free loading, and I don't like enablers either.

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

#92

Post by x0x0 »

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)

> you can also add it to your CV

That can backfire and give an employer the idea you want to do that work though. I not only hate it, but nobody gives a damn until stuff breaks and then everyone is mad. You rarely get rewarded for stuff silently sitting there and working.

edit: to be clear, I think doing it yourself once is great experience. And I've run small web apps on a single server, all the way from supervisord -> nginx -> passenger -> rails with pg and redis. I'd rather build features or work on marketing.

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

#93

Post by aniviacat »

carlosjobim wrote: post #88
aniviacat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 monetar…

> developing isn't for developments sake.

[citation needed]

> the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made

Which means that they can offer their product for a lower price, which then benefits the general public.

Companies being able to operate cheaper / more efficiently does benefit the general public, as long as the market isn't a monopoly. And as per my above comment, most markets are not monopolies.

> open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public

I've been using Audacity, Gimp, Inkscape, uBlock Origin, and many others long before I knew what FOSS means. Spliit is also pretty cool ;)

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

#94

Post by Aachen »

diggan wrote: post #11
roflmaostc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm confused too. Running some sort of VPS would totally do the job, no?

I'm fairly sure you could host this on a last-gen Raspberry PI at home, if you live close to where your users are :)

Definitely don't need a last gen. Someone else did the math upthread and came to one request every 20 seconds, which if you factor in burstiness and that if you have a particularly bad burst that slows down the system a little, the next request will take even longer etc. (ask me how I learned that lesson), it's probably good to budget for it handling multiple requests per second. For this application, my understanding is you've got a handful of people in your group that you're splitting a couple of expenses with, so data processing is small beans and that'll definitely run on a first gen Pi if you optimise it properly, or perhaps a 2nd-3rd gen if you don't want to spend the time

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

#95

Post by LVB »

mtlynch wrote: post #79
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…

> 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. Have you used SQLite with Litestream? That's the beauty of it. You can blow away the app and deploy it somewhere else, and Litestream will just pull down your data and continue along as if nothing happened. At the top of this post, I show a demo of attaching Litestream to my app, a…

I'm currently using SQLite + Litestream with one app, though it's strictly Litestream as a backup/safety net and I'd be manually standing the thing back up if it came to building the server anew, as that's not automated.

If anything, I'd probably end up looking at a dedicated PG VPS. I've started to get used to a few Postgres conveniences over SQLite, especially around datetimes, various extensions, and more sophisticated table alterations (without that infamous SQLite 12-step process), etc. So that's been an evolution, too, compared to my always-SQLite days.

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

#96

Post by LVB »

j45 wrote: post #87
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.

Definitely considering a dedicated Postgres VPS. I've not looked yet, but I'd like to locate a decent cookbook around this. I've installed Postgres on a server before for playing around, and it was easy enough. But there are a lot of settings, considerations around access and backups and updates, etc. I suspect these things aren't overly thorny, but some of the guides/docs can make it feel that way. We'll see, as it's an area of interest, for sure.

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

#99

Post by GreenWatermelon »

immibis wrote: post #86
horsawlarway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

Not just somewhere, but in Rails World 2024 Opening keynote, and it was absolutely hilarious!

Especially with that meme he showed about vercel is laws +500% markup lmaoo

Don't be afraid of computers, don't be the pink elephant!

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

#100

Post by Onavo »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #84
Onavo wrote: post #80

What they need is a payment provider integration so you can ACH or credit card pay immediately. That can also be a monetisation option for them.

You just invented money laundering

Not really, the KYC is usually done on the payment layer depending on which payment platform you use. If you are doing your own ACH, yes, you will need KYC. But if you are using something like stripe connect or dots.dev then KYC is their problem.
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