3 ms·

can we get an Open Source version of this so that we don't a) have to send traffic through your servers and b) hope that you keep providing the service and band

can we get an Open Source version of this so that we don't a) have to send traffic through your servers and b) hope that you keep providing the service and bandwidth indefinitely for free?

rmedaer 6y ago
Hi masukomi. Currently it's still a side project (started a few days). My plan included the following phases: 1. Idea + POC (solved technical issues) => Done 2. Build a MVP => Done 3. Get some feedback and see if there is any interest. => Here we are! 4. Based on feedback, add (premium) features but keep the basic service for free. So in summary; yes it will stay free, I might add some "acceptable" limitations but the goal is indeed to propose additional (non-free) features like well-known services (for instance Gitlab). So feel free to share your ideas, I would enjoy to answer and challenge them! Furthermore I plan to write a small survey to get more feedback. About the "Open Source" part: as a regular FOSS contributor, I do not exclude to publish sources. However, publishing sources means maintaining them. And I don't want to maintain a useless project. So currently I don't want to publish them. Hope it helps you to understand my strategy for this new experience!
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I mean, whatever people might pretend is true when they're lazy, you don't have to maintain anything you don't want to. If you just want to make the source public once and tell anyone who asks for bugfixes where they can stick it, that's your right.
toast0 6y ago
A URL shortener is not that hard to write. At the most basic level it's one table with key = the url blob and value = the url target. There's already several hits for 'open source url shortener' in the top results there's one with MIT and one with GPLv2, and several others that don't specify their license. This one is neat because the author chose to restrict to the qr code "alphanumeric" character set that includes a couple symbols to reduce bits per character in the encoding. Now that you're aware of that, you could certainly do that yourself or modify another shortener to do it.

can we get an Open Source version of this so that we don't a) have to send traffic through your servers and b) hope that you keep providing the service and bandwidth indefinitely for free?

rmedaer 6y ago

Hi masukomi. Currently it's still a side project (started a few days). My plan included the following phases: 1. Idea + POC (solved technical issues) => Done 2. Build a MVP => Done 3. Get some feedback and see if there is any interest. => Here we are! 4. Based on feedback, add (premium) features but keep the basic service for free. So in summary; yes it will stay free, I might add some "acceptable" limitations but the goal is indeed to propose additional (non-free) features like well-known services (for instance Gitlab). So feel free to share your ideas, I would enjoy to answer and challenge them! Furthermore I plan to write a small survey to get more feedback. About the "Open Source" part: as a regular FOSS contributor, I do not exclude to publish sources. However, publishing sources means maintaining them. And I don't want to maintain a useless project. So currently I don't want to publish them. Hope it helps you to understand my strategy for this new experience!

ravi-delia 6y ago
I mean, whatever people might pretend is true when they're lazy, you don't have to maintain anything you don't want to. If you just want to make the source public once and tell anyone who asks for bugfixes where they can stick it, that's your right.

toast0 6y ago

A URL shortener is not that hard to write. At the most basic level it's one table with key = the url blob and value = the url target. There's already several hits for 'open source url shortener' in the top results there's one with MIT and one with GPLv2, and several others that don't specify their license. This one is neat because the author chose to restrict to the qr code "alphanumeric" character set that includes a couple symbols to reduce bits per character in the encoding. Now that you're aware of that, you could certainly do that yourself or modify another shortener to do it.