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I think a serious conversation that needs to be had is that there a lot of tech companies that can produce a useful service. Twitter, Telegram, Snapchat etc com

by dreit1 9y ago

I think a serious conversation that needs to be had is that there a lot of tech companies that can produce a useful service. Twitter, Telegram, Snapchat etc come time to mind, but they will never generate a profit like a traditional business. Does that mean that these services should not exist? Or does it mean there needs to be a non traditional way of financing to where creators can build the product and then have a reasonable way of "being done". Something like Twitter reached a point where it didn't really need more features. How could it sustain itself without constantly growing and paying profits to shareholders? I don't know the answer to this, but it's certainly something that needs to be discussed, because the unfortunate truth is that there are many good services that don't make money

kenning 9y ago
My hope is that big businesses put a ton of money into creating new products, and when the space is understood, someone makes an open source version. Then the consumers of those products start to resent the people making money off of them and the private thing dies off. There are not really any models of this though, sadly.
- golergka 9y ago
  First of all, open source versions often are just not as good. I was a fan of gitlab for personal projects, but after trying it for a couple of months on a company's project, we moved back to github because of all the bugs and low perfomance. Second, who's going to pay for all the servers?
  - connorshea 9y ago
    When did you try GitLab, and was it self-hosted or GitLab.com? We've been working on improving performance, especially on GitLab.com, for the last two years now. Having started around then I can definitely say it was pretty miserable back then, but it's infinitely better now. You can see our infrastructure issue tracker for more info on what we've worked on over the last few months and what we're doing now: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues

by dreit1 9y ago

kenning 9y ago

My hope is that big businesses put a ton of money into creating new products, and when the space is understood, someone makes an open source version. Then the consumers of those products start to resent the people making money off of them and the private thing dies off. There are not really any models of this though, sadly.

golergka 9y ago
First of all, open source versions often are just not as good. I was a fan of gitlab for personal projects, but after trying it for a couple of months on a company's project, we moved back to github because of all the bugs and low perfomance. Second, who's going to pay for all the servers?
- connorshea 9y ago
  When did you try GitLab, and was it self-hosted or GitLab.com? We've been working on improving performance, especially on GitLab.com, for the last two years now. Having started around then I can definitely say it was pretty miserable back then, but it's infinitely better now. You can see our infrastructure issue tracker for more info on what we've worked on over the last few months and what we're doing now: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues