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if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed.

If it wasn't for the OSS community, everybody would believe they've released a safe program. Thanks to OSS, we now know that installing it is not the best decision yet.
I'd say the users would be screwed if diaspora was not open source. Linus Law once again.

I was not surprised to find out that the author sells proprietary software. I think that maybe, just maybe he's biased against FLOSS?

While I'm busy replacing the pile of molten slag that is my VPS, you can find the whole thing here, served as all static (including assets):

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/kalzumeus-cache/names.html

>>
Well if you open source the code im sure that someone who needs* a "bingo card creator" would be happy to contribute
>>

I gave you a link to the OSS project in grandparent. It hasn't seen a patch since 2004. Reality sucks, doesn't it.

>>
*disclaimer: no one needs this.
>>

This is why we let customers decide what they "need" instead of letting lazy programmers on Slashdot decide it. Customers have signaled, via paying me ~$18,000, that they really do need this.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

This is *not a hypothetical* -- Sourceforge gives out downloads as public information, and so do I.

My OSS competitor has been downloaded 40 times in the last week.

http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=47026&ugn=bingo-cards&type=prdownload

My software has been downloaded 40 times in the last thirty minutes.

(A related statistic, which typically tracks at a ratio of about 1 of these to 1.2 downloads: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/bingo-card-downloads )

There are a variety of reasons for that. One is that my software actually works and the OSS version is broken. The other is that the profit incentive makes it worthwhile for me to spend a sigificant amount of time and money promoting the use of the software, rather than just uploading it to a server somewhere with a description that doesn't even address the needs of the end user and then calling it a day.

It is what makes up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let the laborer execercise some limited degree of control over the fruits of the labor. This does not mean any one person can own their labor, any more than they can own a sunset.

There, I fixed that for you. Sounds like a crappy way to structure a society... good thing nobody would ever be stupid enough to go for it. Oh wait...

I write software for a living. If I stop getting paid for it, I'll stop doing it. There won't be any more sunsets, for the ~1,000 people who are dependent on my software. You can claim "society owns the idea" all you want, but "ideas" are hard to compile. Society has not produced workable bytecode, except insofar as "society" has chosen to make a "market" and the market pays enough to make it worthwhile for one engineer to create bytecode. (And to market and whatnot, which are my more important contributions. It wouldn't help society out very much if the solution were buried in the basement water closet behind a sign that said Beware Of The Hairy OSS Programmer, right?)

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/

Here is my broken OSS competitor. Get cracking, it needs a LOT of work. I suggest starting by fixing whatever the bug is that prevents it from working on Windows. Then you might clean up the GUI a bit. Go on, get cracking -- you owe it to society, after all.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ sells a Java application that I wrote. The site itself, while it doesn't look like it, is written in Rails. Nothing really fancy -- it is essentially a purpose-built CMS which allows me to scale one very niche form of content writing horizontally. More content written more efficiently means more visitors, more prospects to sell my product to, and more money for me. Previously, it was just a static HTML site, which was harder to expand and extraordinarily difficult to make efficient sitewide tests and changes to (e.g. does moving the menu around on all the pages cause conversion to the free trial to increase).

Could I have written it in PHP? Sure. Could I have done it as quickly? Probably not. The problem screams Rails Me -- little application, not all that much complexity (probably under 500 LOC outside of the view templates, which are 99% HTML), and its performance requirements are quite modest. (It typically deals with about a thousand visitors a day, although the application could chug through that in about 10 seconds in my tests, with caching turned off.) As for the exhorbitant hardware costs of the system, I was forced to move up from $7 shared hosting to a $20 VPS so that I could continue doing $1,500 in sales every month. Oh noes.

Anyhow, like I said, pretty boring. I anticipate, on the basis of the increase in traffic and trial downloads that I've had since launching, that the rewrite will be worth about $100 in additional profits for every hour I worked within the first two months. I keep adding new little features, too -- spent an hour yesterday adding Javascript graphs on the back end -- and it is some of the easiest web programming I've ever done. (I do Big Freaking Enterprise Apps in Java by day.)

Incidentally, a big "Heck yes" to parent when they said "The real money, however, is in developing your own stuff and then selling it on as a going concern." Why take a fraction of the revenue of your client's website once when you can operate the website yourself and take all of it on an ongoing basis. (And if it gets to be too much work, you hire out the boring stuff to folks who think $10, $50, or $100 an hour is a lot of money.)

>>
Free software will outlive Sun's program and Sun itself because people who need code will always be better off with free software.
>>

"People who need code" overwhelmingly choose my (commercial, closed source -- http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ ) hobby project over my OSS competitor (bingo-cards, feel free to look it up on Sourceforge) because mine actually works. Without a monetary incentive (and $10,000 in 2007 was a nice monetary incentive, and likely far more than Sun will be paying out to key developers on projects of much more importance) geeks don't just magically materialize and start solving problems like "3rd grade ESL teachers in the United States don't have enough software written for them yet" (picked one of my customer groups at random).

My software: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/
A similarly featured bit of OSS: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/

Capsule summary: Like the name suggests, it creates bingo cards, and that is all. At least, that is how most computer programmers perceive the problem, and that is why Bingo Card Creator is in use in a couple hundred classrooms and bingo-cards sees about as many downloads in a year as my free trial sees in a mediocre week.

Programmers hate writing boring code, which is one of the reasons why Ruby on Rails is so phenomenally popular. Printing logic is a good example. There are few things in life which are more boring than getting text to be properly sized in a grid on an arbitrary printer, without crowding the grid lines. Roughly 1/3 of the LOC and 90% of the complexity of my program is making printing pretty and easy enough for your grandmother to do it. The writer of bingo-cards, on the other hand, decided to punt on this: seeing as how many browsers have perfectly good printing routines already, he just exports to HTML and then you can print the resulting files yourself. Simple, right? Well, not to put a fine a point on it, while that is a great choice for the programmer it is a terrible, terrible choice for the user... and there are users out there who *don't know how* to print an arbitrary file in the file system. Trust me, I answer emails from them on a weekly basis.

Another example: aesthetics. My downloads doubled the day I replaced some old freeware new/open/save/print icons (which looked, eh, lets call them "utilitarian") with the big, attractive stock icons you now see on my screenshots. Look at Apple: design is a feature! bingo-cards' design is overly complicated and aesthetically unpleasant. If you can get it to run on a Windows box* take a looksie -- the main interface has several dozen controls on it and will overwhelm many users.

* The install blows up on some systems. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Support: If you mail support@iprintedmydomainabove.com, you'll always get someone happy to help you. If there were hypothetically a mailing list for bingo-cards, most of the technically non-adept teachers asking it for help would be told to RTFM and go away. (Typical support request: "help i cant print. Thanks, Suzy") Folks have been terribly treated by the software industry, and many of them actively fear software. They have been made to think that its both natural when something goes wrong and that, by the way, when something goes wrong it is their fault. I treat every emailer with respect and when Suzy can't print thats because I clearly haven't made it easy enough yet.

Marketing: I know there is a bit of scorn among some in the OSS community for this, but hey, technically superior programs do not always win... and thats a good thing. bingo-cards, for example, has much worse performance in search engines than I do despite the fact that SourceForge has PageRank out the yin-yang and I do not. The main reason is that I actually took the time to write in comprehensible English about how you can use my program to (fill in the blank), and that nobody ever did this for bingo-cards. Documentation adds value to the user! (So do screenshots! And websites which don't make you search for the "What the heck do I need to download to get this running on a Dell?" button.)

"OSS is a great idea because you can have students and teachers reprogram it." Yeaaaaah, you get right to that. My guess is that most elementary English teachers think that programming is similar to papermaking: fascinating that people can do it, truly a worthwhile skill, but just give me something to let me get back on track for the lesson plan because I have 10 kids here who aren't reading at grade level yet. They don't want to spend hours of their acutely limited time hacking any more than they want to physically transform pulp to paper so that they ca

I'm just a wee little guy with a software business I run in my spare time (it makes bingo cards for teachers: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ ). Can you run by, exactly, how I am stealing my income from writing (and marketing/supporting) that?

Its not like people were happily playing bingo for free one day and then, in Carmen Sandiego-like fashion, I just grabbed the entire concept and absconded with it, then hid clues to my location while confounding the player with a series of inept accomplices. There are at least 12 people/companies who sell or offer for free similar software. There is even an OSS bingo card maker. (Its buggy, unsupported, has a GUI which can induce heart attacks, can't actually print the cards it creates, bluescreens some windows systems on an install, and hasn't had a patch in years... but its Free!)

It wasn't like there was a copy of the 2,500 lines of source code sitting online for free since the 1980s until I sent my squads of lawyers to DMCA anybody who looked at them. No. I saw a hole in the market, because the existing software which creates bingo cards for teachers was a) too hard to use, b) too expensive, c) poorly marketed and d) in general, sucked, and the non-software ways to get bingo cards are overpriced (educational publisher) or time-consuming (making them by hand).

So I spent a week of my own time and fixed that. Had I not spent a week, that problem would remain unfixed, and the circa five thousand people who played a game of bingo this year that was printed from my software would be bingo-less. Two hundred teachers would be wasting their time writing bingo cards by hand when they could be educating kids. Little kiddies would be missing their Friday sight words fun activities (See aye tee CAT! I win bingoes!). For making the world just a wee bit better than it was before I sat down, yes, I think I deserve to get compensated. Or to take all the moral freighting out of that word "deserve": had there been no compensation in the offing, I would not have written this, and the world would be just a wee bit poorer than it is today.

So, again, how am I stealing from anyone?

I would suggest reading some of the posts by Patrick McKenzie on his blog. He has some great ideas on how to handle customer support and why you should treat your customers with the upmost respect.

One good post is this one in response to a rant from Ryan Carson @ Dropsend.

Patrick runs a small ISV selling bingo card software, so he has some experience dealing with non-technical customers. Definately worth subscribing to his RSS feed.

Its actually a lot easier than you think. There are 25.8 million businesses in the United States. About 17 million of them have only one employee. Those seventeen million business owners aren't ALL smarter, better educated, more savvy, etc. than you. They are, however, as a group a heck of a lot richer than you are. Two-thirds of American millionaires are self-employed. Some of them are in stereotypical "Oh, rich educated professionals only" jobs like law and medicine (not that all practioners in these fields are rich). Others, not so much.

I know one guy who thought moving garbage was easy enough for any idiot to do it, so he might as well start. He went to the construction companies in the area and said "Hey, I've got a truck and time. You've got money and trash. Lets trade." Apparently, you can make a lot of money driving a truck between two fixed points. Anyhow, he was making pretty good money for a guy whose job is getting from A to B, and then he had a brainstorm: wait a second, I make enough money to pay for the loan on TWO trucks. I can get a buddy to drive the second truck, pay him a quarter of what the company pays me, use the second quarter to pay for the truck, and keep half! Anyhow, fast forward a decade, he now owns about a couple of dozen trucks and drives a... darn, I don't know the brand (sorry, I'm a geek, not a car lover). Whatever. Its one of those Alienware of cars where you pay a lot to let people know you've paid a lot.

Heck, I started my own small business with approximately two weeks of planning, half of which was coding the software product which I sell. My capital investment was $60. That business takes about 2-4 hours of work to maintain a month and, in March, I profited about $620 from it (pre-taxes). Obviously, I'm not planning on leaving the day job (which I enjoy) immediately, but as I gradually develop more sales and more software its certainly an option on the table. Its got a lot to recommend it to -- I can't get fired, I can read Slashdot at work without feeling guilty, I never feel bored at the meetings, and my raise is always determined by merit.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/

When is the last time you saw midnight madness over the launch of what is essentially a mass-market business, home office, and consumer product? Vista isn't aimed at the hard core gamers who love midnight launches as part of their culture. Its not designed to generate massive amounts of passion. Its aimed at EVERYBODY, and lets face it, EVERYBODY includes a large number of people who not only do not care about their computers, they actively dislike using them. But they have to use them, because email, the Internet, and MS Word are three things which are indispensable to modern life for a lot of people. These folks will buy Vista, by the hundreds of millions, and they will get significant value out of it -- their machines will probably be less likely to turn into zombies or unusably infested spyware boxes than they were before. But they'll never throw a party to celebrate an object which for them is just a really expensive toaster. Do you have a relationship with your toaster? No, you use your toaster, it makes toast. Maybe it makes toast really well, but its still just a toaster, a tool for you to quickly get your toast and get on with life.

I sell a software product to an audience which is the polar opposite of Slashdot in terms of technical skills (it makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers). There were no launch parties for it, either, but it has pleasantly exceeded my expectations for popularity. Most people here would probably be askance that I can even ask $25 for it. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ (Speaking of which, I suppose one of these days I should make the installer program Vista compatible. I'm probably not going to have any early adopter customers but once the new Dells come out who knows.)

Google wants to own the Internet advertising game. Currently, their CPC (cost per click) offering is dominant but they have to continue expanding, and that means offering new products that fix the flaws with CPC, such as click fraud. The one totally fraud-proof advertising method is CPA: Cost Per Action/Aquisition. Basically, if you buy Bingo Card Creator (my little software program) after you click on my AdWords ad, I pay Google, say, $5. I don't pay them $.05 every time someone clicks on the ad anymore.

What does this have to do with Checkout? Without Checkout, Google has no way to know if I consumated the sale or not. "Uh, no, Google, sorry... my sales this month were only 2 units. Here's a check for $10. A pleasure as always, please show my ads next month." But my sales were actually 100 units, so I just screwed them out of $490 in revenue... and there is no way they can know. But if Google gets me to use Checkout, then they can roll out a CPA program at their leisure, and force me to use Checkout to offer the program. If I'm already using Checkout, this isn't a problem -- just like Analytics paves the way for AdWords, Checkout paves the way for gCPA. Thats a chicken and egg problem, so they're working on artificial egg production: getting customers to sign up for Checkout by offering $10 off a purchase for opening an account, getting sellers to sign up for Checkout by offering free payment processing through the end of 2007, etc.

Is it working? Anecdotally, not yet. I started offering Checkout a week ago and *all* of my customers who have used it opened their account specifically to buy my software (Google's fraud prevention system will list how long an account has been opened when the order is placed -- mine were all "0 days"). I guess Google could count that as a win though, considering I'm now in the system ready to start using CPA when it becomes available, and they've now got another dozen users with their credit cards on file at the Googleplex, who are now available to buy from any other Checkout-enabled merchant without putting up with the overly long checkout process again.

Incidentally, if you want to see my little slice of e-commerce, http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ . I integrate both the Paypal and Google options into my shopping cart. I guarantee you, if my users (elementary schoolteachers) can get through the Google UI, anybody can. I personally feel that its far inferior to Paypal but offer both as an option because a) some people hate Paypal and won't use them and b) hey, if I can save a couple hundred a year on Paypal fees, that money goes directly into my pocket.

The software is Bingo Card Creator, which makes bingo cards principally for elementary school teachers. I didn't mention it because its associated with my real name and, well, no sane person exposes their real name to Slashdot. But, eh, whatever. My minor loss of privacy is worth getting to laugh a little at your expense.

>>Perhaps the price was too high, or the software wasn't very good.>>

Well, I suppose a lot of slashdotters might say that. Then again, 10 elementary school teachers (who, you know, are actually in the market for this) paid money for it, and I'm inclined to trust opinions which come backed with checks. My best guess is that the spike was caused by that whole being on the front page of a major warez site thing, which I learned about from my referrer logs. But you can't see those, so I guess you won't trust me. Ahh well, here's the next best thing: a screengrab of my Analytics console (yeah, I could fake this if I had a few hours -- but do you think I bothered?). It doesn't show you the 3GB of transfer from my screenshots or the 500 direct-linked downloads because Analytics uses Javascript to record hits and jpg/exe do not, typically, contain Javascript :). (My plan, incidentally, was to use .htaccess to replace the hotlinked image with the Japanese imperial war flag and replace the hotlinked .exe with one with all the buttons saying "I love Falun Gong". I decided against it because I figured some bastard would just DDOS me. Plus a lot of the l33t cr3w were actually from outside of China, so they wouldn't be able to appreciate my sense of humor.)

Here's one showing the "slight" increase in my traffic. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked1.jpg From single digit pageviews per day to about 200 -- and thats just the number hitting my home page. The graph then trails off to normal and you can see me busily building up my little hobbyist marketing campaign. (Notice the spike marked "Market Seasonality"? The full explanation for that: traffic always dips on a weekend, and lots of teachers go back to work in August. When August 1st rolled around right after the weekend, I had a 30% or so increase in traffic from the Friday before. As opposed to the gazillion% increase from the hacker site.)

Here's another showing exactly who was hitting my site for 2 days before and 2 days after the crack debuted. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked2.jpg (Funny, 0daycn.net does not sound to me like a place where elementary schoolteachers hang out.)

The software is Bingo Card Creator, which makes bingo cards principally for elementary school teachers. I didn't mention it because its associated with my real name and, well, no sane person exposes their real name to Slashdot. But, eh, whatever. My minor loss of privacy is worth getting to laugh a little at your expense.

>>Perhaps the price was too high, or the software wasn't very good.>>

Well, I suppose a lot of slashdotters might say that. Then again, 10 elementary school teachers (who, you know, are actually in the market for this) paid money for it, and I'm inclined to trust opinions which come backed with checks. My best guess is that the spike was caused by that whole being on the front page of a major warez site thing, which I learned about from my referrer logs. But you can't see those, so I guess you won't trust me. Ahh well, here's the next best thing: a screengrab of my Analytics console (yeah, I could fake this if I had a few hours -- but do you think I bothered?). It doesn't show you the 3GB of transfer from my screenshots or the 500 direct-linked downloads because Analytics uses Javascript to record hits and jpg/exe do not, typically, contain Javascript :). (My plan, incidentally, was to use .htaccess to replace the hotlinked image with the Japanese imperial war flag and replace the hotlinked .exe with one with all the buttons saying "I love Falun Gong". I decided against it because I figured some bastard would just DDOS me. Plus a lot of the l33t cr3w were actually from outside of China, so they wouldn't be able to appreciate my sense of humor.)

Here's one showing the "slight" increase in my traffic. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked1.jpg From single digit pageviews per day to about 200 -- and thats just the number hitting my home page. The graph then trails off to normal and you can see me busily building up my little hobbyist marketing campaign. (Notice the spike marked "Market Seasonality"? The full explanation for that: traffic always dips on a weekend, and lots of teachers go back to work in August. When August 1st rolled around right after the weekend, I had a 30% or so increase in traffic from the Friday before. As opposed to the gazillion% increase from the hacker site.)

Here's another showing exactly who was hitting my site for 2 days before and 2 days after the crack debuted. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked2.jpg (Funny, 0daycn.net does not sound to me like a place where elementary schoolteachers hang out.)

I'm an AdSense advertiser (hawking my program to make bingo cards for teachers -- there is no other form of advertising which makes any sense for this niche at all) and I *clean up* on some of my keywords because I have a CTR of around 5-20% (for some words) and some advertisers who have inexpertly targetted their ad are offering twice as much but for a click through rate which is likely much lower. On the flip side, I also have some words which aren't well targetted but which are dirt cheap, and its a good day when I hit 1% on them. (My conversion rate to trial downloads is about 10% either way, ironically.)

"Sites", not "sights". I know exactly why I did this, too: I've been working on a side-project developing a program which makes bingo cards for teachers and have mistyped "Dolch sight word lists" as "Dolch site word lists" so many times in the last two weeks that this must have been out of a desire to even the balance.