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Open sourcing something like this feels like marketing more than anything else. They suffer from the same "cold start" problem that social apps do. For the pro
by mvkel 2y ago
Open sourcing something like this feels like marketing more than anything else.
They suffer from the same "cold start" problem that social apps do. For the project to thrive, there needs to be an existing fanbase to improve and support it.
Is what makes Wordpress great the fact that it's open source? No. It's the community of builders that surround it.
Would anyone realistically be willing to spin this stack up in their existing company (and sign up for maintaining it)?
I expect you'll get a few git clones from engineers to poke around to see how it was built, out of curiosity, but not much more.
Of course the natural response would be "who cares? They opened the source so you can if you want to!"
That's fair. I guess I just get stuck on the "why"
- jnsie 2y agoWhile I see your point (and largely feel the same way) I suppose the other side of it is pull requests. Nice to enable the community to provide supplemental software development.
- serial_dev 2y agoSentry is in a similar boat, it's (almost) open source, and you need a very beefy machine to even start all the necessary services, it's not a simple set up by any means if you want a comparable experience to the real thing... And still, people do get that done, and it is great that you have the self hosting option if you don't like their pricing (or if they ever go suddenly bankrupt, compromising your business).
- domysee 2y agoI'm self-hosting Sentry together with Plausible Analytics. It's actually not that expensive, the VPS I'm using has 16 GB memory and 4 CPUs, and sets me back ~15€/month. Not sure if there's enough free performance to run Loudspeaker, but I'm definitely considering it.
- abe94 2y agoHey, yes most companies would not want to self host, and for them there are plenty of options, but we do have companies that opt to self host. There are few reasons we have seen so far - Operating in a regulated industry, we have customers who cannot send customer data to 3rd party services (in financial services, healthcare) and need to self host for that reason - Existing solutions are too expensive for their business model, we have Kenyan, Brazilian and Mexican consumer focused companies from other countries spin up and use the self-hosted solution - Cost savings and Philosophy, believe it or not there are some companies which like to self host software if possible, and have dedicated dev ops resources already maintaining software and spinning up another solution is not that much incremental work. Beyond that there are other reasons to want to open source a solution like this. Anyone can add communication channels and integrations for example. And lastly its fun to work on an open code base!