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Great questions. 1) They are different codebases. OS was written in Go by the previous developer. I rewrote everything in Laravel 2) We don't think we'll be p

Great questions. 1) They are different codebases. OS was written in Go by the previous developer. I rewrote everything in Laravel 2) We don't think we'll be porting it to OS but there's no decision on this yet 3) That's a great idea regarding a license, because a lot of people want to self-host... We'll have a think because we've purposely tied our app to certain infastructure, so we'd need to put in significant work to make it transportable. I'm not saying never, I just don't know. We address some of the complications on the podcast. These are solid questions, thank you.

dylz 7y ago
Do you think with the new Laravel stuff, 2) might be more feasible? I write a surprising amount of PHP for fun (not work/profit, so not really critical either) and IME Laravel has been incredibly easy to port out, with native config file support, CLI migrations, etc. I think 3) is interesting, because effectively a huge draw of your product is targeting privacy conscious people, and those are probably the least likely to want to trust a third party for it. I used https://haveamint.com/ https://haveamint.com/ for a while, but it's also been dead for quite a while. I haven't been able to get Piwik to handle my traffic volume. I don't make anything from my side projects, but I prefer self hosting to know exactly how much data is being collected and reduce it or modify the tracker script as needed, location-respect by hosting analytics data in the same datacentre as the site (so EU users aren't randomly getting analytics ticks sent to US or whatever, some people care, this is just easier for me), and it's really, really cheap to have bulk capacity for me compared to paying a SaaS per pageview - I have about 4 TB of RAM free right now on my (mostly k8s) clusters.
- JackWritesCode 7y ago
  So it's not Laravel that's making it hard, it just means that we'd have to rethink how we've tied our product to the infastructure. It's definitely possible, and if we go down that route, the software in Laravel will make it a breeze to export. We spoke with a chap on twitter who made a great point that we'd likely see more contributions since it's in PHP / Laravel. Less people know Go, and one of the big reasons we didn't feel the obligation to OS the new version was because next to nobody contributed to the Lite version. And you're right. There are a segment of people who won't use analytics unless they're self-hosted. Totally understandable. We'll see what happens. It's not on the roadmap in the immediate future but we're not ruling it out.
  - tedivm 7y ago
    I'm that chap that spoke to them on twitter. I want to be very clear about what happened- one of the cofounders blocked me on twitter for asking these questions (even though I was polite about it), and then the other one reached out and we had a pretty decent call. Unfortunately that call made it very clear that they were not going to make the new version open source.
    - JackWritesCode 7y ago
      Until I spoke to you, I thought you were a troll and so did Paul :P That call with you was very useful and gave us a lot to think about. We recorded a podcast about OS and I mentioned our call: https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemma https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemm...

dylz 7y ago

Do you think with the new Laravel stuff, 2) might be more feasible? I write a surprising amount of PHP for fun (not work/profit, so not really critical either) and IME Laravel has been incredibly easy to port out, with native config file support, CLI migrations, etc. I think 3) is interesting, because effectively a huge draw of your product is targeting privacy conscious people, and those are probably the least likely to want to trust a third party for it. I used https://haveamint.com/ https://haveamint.com/ for a while, but it's also been dead for quite a while. I haven't been able to get Piwik to handle my traffic volume. I don't make anything from my side projects, but I prefer self hosting to know exactly how much data is being collected and reduce it or modify the tracker script as needed, location-respect by hosting analytics data in the same datacentre as the site (so EU users aren't randomly getting analytics ticks sent to US or whatever, some people care, this is just easier for me), and it's really, really cheap to have bulk capacity for me compared to paying a SaaS per pageview - I have about 4 TB of RAM free right now on my (mostly k8s) clusters.

JackWritesCode 7y ago
So it's not Laravel that's making it hard, it just means that we'd have to rethink how we've tied our product to the infastructure. It's definitely possible, and if we go down that route, the software in Laravel will make it a breeze to export. We spoke with a chap on twitter who made a great point that we'd likely see more contributions since it's in PHP / Laravel. Less people know Go, and one of the big reasons we didn't feel the obligation to OS the new version was because next to nobody contributed to the Lite version. And you're right. There are a segment of people who won't use analytics unless they're self-hosted. Totally understandable. We'll see what happens. It's not on the roadmap in the immediate future but we're not ruling it out.
- tedivm 7y ago
  I'm that chap that spoke to them on twitter. I want to be very clear about what happened- one of the cofounders blocked me on twitter for asking these questions (even though I was polite about it), and then the other one reached out and we had a pretty decent call. Unfortunately that call made it very clear that they were not going to make the new version open source.
  - JackWritesCode 7y ago
    Until I spoke to you, I thought you were a troll and so did Paul :P That call with you was very useful and gave us a lot to think about. We recorded a podcast about OS and I mentioned our call: https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemma https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemm...