4 ms·

Did they operate like a startup? Where can I read about it?

by cool-RR 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago
They're a YC company now.
- mahmud 18y ago
  it makes very little sense to take a product with the name recognition of Webmin back to an incubator. neither the money nor the YC mentoring seem a good fit for them; they could have gotten funding from RedHat, IBM, Oracle or whoever else. And with respect to the mentoring, i don't think the server automation tools like Webmin or cPanel see much love from hackers; their clients and market base are in the shared hosting industry. Hope I'm wrong about this.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    "it makes very little sense to take a product with the name recognition of Webmin back to an incubator" We don't think so. Webmin is an Open Source project. Virtualmin, Inc. is a business. The business is new, and had pretty low recognition when we accepted YC funding. We're still not as well known as a company as we are as an Open Source project, but we are finding more and more of our customers have never used or heard of Webmin. "neither the money nor the YC mentoring seem a good fit for them; they could have gotten funding from RedHat, IBM, Oracle or whoever else." This makes assumptions about us and our company that aren't accurate. We weren't looking for funding for our Open Source projects. We've funded them just fine on our own for 11 years; Jamie and I have lived off of our Webmin-related projects for most of our professional careers. Now we are building a product startup that has a shared codebase and a large number of shared objectives to our Open Source projects. Building a business (a startup, and not a consulting business) is a very different process than building a successful Open Source project. We wanted some help with the former. YC provided it. "i don't think the server automation tools like Webmin or cPanel see much love from hackers" We'd rather you not group cPanel and Webmin together like that. They aren't even in the same market. Webmin is for system administrators, cPanel (and Virtualmin) is for hosting providers and their customers. Webmin happens to have been used by hosting providers a lot over the years, but it's a general purpose administration tool in use by large and small companies and individuals all over the world. I won't make claims about how hackers feel about Webmin, but I will mention that Webmin is downloaded more than 2 million times per year. I can't think of who else would be downloading it from SourceForge. It's a UNIX system administrators tool. A very large percentage of UNIX system administrators are also hackers. It also makes me a very sad panda to know that you think we do the things that cPanel does that makes hackers hate cPanel (and thus think those same hackers should dislike what we do). We don't generate config files from templates...we parse them and edit them. We respect comments, file order, and if we don't understand a directive (say, for an Apache module we don't know about) we won't break it. We work the way the OS does, respecting file locations and defaults (like Debian's sites-enabled/sites-available, or the per-interface iptables stuff), and go to great lengths to do so (have a look at the hundreds of per-OS config files found in Webmin for an understanding of just how great those lengths are). And, we provide copious documentation, over one thousand printed pages worth, for how things are working and how they map to the underlying system. All of these things are dramatically different from cPanel, and are designed from the perspective of "I want a tool that helps me do my job rather than forcing the world to revolve around it".
SwellJoe 18y ago
I talked a bit about it (where "it" is "building a business on Open Source") last year on our blog: http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precarious-partnership http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precar...
- cool-RR 18y ago
  I'm starting to read it, it's very helpful, thanks!

Did they operate like a startup? Where can I read about it?

by cool-RR 18y ago

Did they operate like a startup? Where can I read about it?

tptacek 18y ago

They're a YC company now.

mahmud 18y ago
it makes very little sense to take a product with the name recognition of Webmin back to an incubator. neither the money nor the YC mentoring seem a good fit for them; they could have gotten funding from RedHat, IBM, Oracle or whoever else. And with respect to the mentoring, i don't think the server automation tools like Webmin or cPanel see much love from hackers; their clients and market base are in the shared hosting industry. Hope I'm wrong about this.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  "it makes very little sense to take a product with the name recognition of Webmin back to an incubator" We don't think so. Webmin is an Open Source project. Virtualmin, Inc. is a business. The business is new, and had pretty low recognition when we accepted YC funding. We're still not as well known as a company as we are as an Open Source project, but we are finding more and more of our customers have never used or heard of Webmin. "neither the money nor the YC mentoring seem a good fit for them; they could have gotten funding from RedHat, IBM, Oracle or whoever else." This makes assumptions about us and our company that aren't accurate. We weren't looking for funding for our Open Source projects. We've funded them just fine on our own for 11 years; Jamie and I have lived off of our Webmin-related projects for most of our professional careers. Now we are building a product startup that has a shared codebase and a large number of shared objectives to our Open Source projects. Building a business (a startup, and not a consulting business) is a very different process than building a successful Open Source project. We wanted some help with the former. YC provided it. "i don't think the server automation tools like Webmin or cPanel see much love from hackers" We'd rather you not group cPanel and Webmin together like that. They aren't even in the same market. Webmin is for system administrators, cPanel (and Virtualmin) is for hosting providers and their customers. Webmin happens to have been used by hosting providers a lot over the years, but it's a general purpose administration tool in use by large and small companies and individuals all over the world. I won't make claims about how hackers feel about Webmin, but I will mention that Webmin is downloaded more than 2 million times per year. I can't think of who else would be downloading it from SourceForge. It's a UNIX system administrators tool. A very large percentage of UNIX system administrators are also hackers. It also makes me a very sad panda to know that you think we do the things that cPanel does that makes hackers hate cPanel (and thus think those same hackers should dislike what we do). We don't generate config files from templates...we parse them and edit them. We respect comments, file order, and if we don't understand a directive (say, for an Apache module we don't know about) we won't break it. We work the way the OS does, respecting file locations and defaults (like Debian's sites-enabled/sites-available, or the per-interface iptables stuff), and go to great lengths to do so (have a look at the hundreds of per-OS config files found in Webmin for an understanding of just how great those lengths are). And, we provide copious documentation, over one thousand printed pages worth, for how things are working and how they map to the underlying system. All of these things are dramatically different from cPanel, and are designed from the perspective of "I want a tool that helps me do my job rather than forcing the world to revolve around it".

SwellJoe 18y ago

I talked a bit about it (where "it" is "building a business on Open Source") last year on our blog: http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precarious-partnership http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precar...

cool-RR 18y ago
I'm starting to read it, it's very helpful, thanks!