Don't, because the market is full of bedroom hosts who don't know what they're doing.
Don't, because unless you're going into it seriously (and by that I mean investing time and money heavily, hiring enough staff to provide 24/7 support and decent SLAs, and charging appropriately serious money), the margins have to be so low to be competitive that you're losing money when the customer submits more than one ticket a year. Which they will do, because they've come to you, which means they don't know what they're doing. Hosting is, in some ways (as you aptly describe), a "market for lemons":
In Information Rules the authors suggest that clients need to be informed about the potential for lock in, and crucially, to negotiate a good deal before signing up, while they still have bargaining power.
Perfect stats are impossible. However, I think that even imperfect stats can give you a good glimpse of what's going on. This is my own attempt at doing so, which I think is a bit better than TIOBE's in that I track more things:
No, it was aimed squarely at having a smaller libc than glibc, according to the google guy who was hanging out on #android. It is an "embedded device" with space constraints, you know!
Paying income taxes is one thing, but huge import duties on high tech products is "shooting yourself in the balls" as they say in Italian. Emerging economies have plenty of problems without trying to strangle their tech sectors like that.
Since I've worked pretty hard on it, I'll take a moment or two to promote my own 'platform': Hecl, at http://www.hecl.org./ It's a scripting language built on top of J2ME, which means that no, you probably shouldn't write games with it, but on the other hand, it should make it far easier for the 'average Joe' to actually be able to successfully create an application, and for a good developer to do things much faster than with J2ME.
Also, for fun, I created a prediction market about which platform will dominate, but since it's not played with real money, it's not worth all that much:
+1 to both comments. I have found that most people labelling themselves "ethical hackers" are uhm... it's hard to put this politely... shall we say their bark is louder than their bite?
"It's one thing to go through several days of Googling and HOWTOs when setting up a new OS for the first time."
That was true a while ago, but Linux has made enormous progress since then. Ubuntu is super easy to set up, as easy as windows is most of the time. My wife wrote her doctoral thesis with virtually no assistance from me on her laptop, which runs Ubuntu.
I thought the whole point of Open Source was doing good for mankind in general, not categorically for the investors...
Ok, but even so, you have to make it sustainable, and how to do so is still an open question.
There's no doubt in my mind that open source works, and works well. It has produced some great things, but I think we're still figuring out exactly how it works in terms of the economics. Proprietary software is certainly simpler:
1) Write product.
2) People buy it.
3) Profit!
4) Improve product, hire developers, etc..
Or:
2) No one buys it.
3) Go out of business, product goes away.
With open source, things are different... You could create something great, and there's no guarantee at all that you'll get anything back for it. In practice, people don't seem to get screwed that badly, but it's not as tight a feedback loop.
eCos is an open source, royalty-free, real-time operating system intended for embedded applications. The highly configurable nature of eCos allows the operating system to be customised to precise application requirements, delivering the best possible run-time performance and an optimised hardware resource footprint.
It's a pretty cool little OS, mostly because it's smaller and easier to understand, and hack on, then Linux. That said, it also doesn't do, or even try to do, as much as Linux, so you would want to use it for smaller, simpler devices, most likely.
I am putting together a time tracking system that is free for basic use and comes with a one month trial for the group use features. It's available here:
It's very simple and straightforward - what it has going for it is that all you have to do is tell it what you're working on via drag and drop, and it keeps track of how long you've been active on the project. Of course, this makes it most suitable for people who are at their computers most of the day, but I guess you can't be everything to everyone.
It is still beta-ish, so pricing is open to negotiation and feature requests are welcome.
Well, except for the fact that the VC's put thousands/millions of dollars (and quite often some of their own) into the idea. These guys just give you a magazine subscription.
To me it sounds like they're copying the advice in "The Innovator's Dilemma" and attempting to hive off an "internal startup", but perhaps they should have done it with people who already had some ideas, plucked from within the organization...
It's going pretty well and seems to have become popular enough in its niche that it's not just me maintaining it, and it (almost) pays for the hosting, with adsense.
Good points. Also, while I don't think the question is about outsourced hosting at the cheap end like I discuss, keep in mind that there is something of a "market for lemons" effect:
Your descendants will thank the AmigaOS team, when it is the only OS capable of running patched together computers that run the defenses keeping the mutants from the forbidden zone at bay. They will be glad that the Amiga team retreated to The Caverns where they continued to pass down the secrets of the OS from generation to generation, memorizing the entire sequence of bytes in the event of a hard drive failure.
OFBiz, at http://www.ofbiz.org/ has a POS component, although the whole application might be a bit heavyweight/require some customization/slimming down for your needs. It's worth a look, though.
Yeah, it's a proprietary platform, but... 'niche'... depends on how you look at it. At least for J2ME, potential users number in the millions, given the phones out there right now. That's an awful lot of people.
Perhaps you should look at Lisp/Smalltalk/Your favorite academic language not being able to market their way out of a wet paper back:-) If they've had since the 70ies to build something that'll take off, and they haven't, they're doing something wrong, and it sure isn't the languages themselves, because they are very nice indeed.
Changing subjects, one of *my* favorite "cheap Lisp imitations" (it's Lisp, not LISP) is Tcl:
which is in some ways more flexible than Ruby - you can redefine existing control structures like if and while, or create new ones of your own (such as do... while, which is not part of the core language).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't, because unless you're going into it seriously (and by that I mean investing time and money heavily, hiring enough staff to provide 24/7 support and decent SLAs, and charging appropriately serious money), the margins have to be so low to be competitive that you're losing money when the customer submits more than one ticket a year. Which they will do, because they've come to you, which means they don't know what they're doing. Hosting is, in some ways (as you aptly describe), a "market for lemons":
http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html
I think my own project has a little bit better methodology:
http://www.langpop.com/
However, all of these things have to be taken with a grain of salt.
In Information Rules the authors suggest that clients need to be informed about the potential for lock in, and crucially, to negotiate a good deal before signing up, while they still have bargaining power.
For those who care, feel free to list hardware that doesn't work with (open source) Linux here:
http://www.leenooks.com/
Notes on hardware that now works (even better with actual free drivers) are very welcome too.
Also, do avoid purchasing things there if you want a fully functional, free system.
Perfect stats are impossible. However, I think that even imperfect stats can give you a good glimpse of what's going on. This is my own attempt at doing so, which I think is a bit better than TIOBE's in that I track more things:
http://www.langpop.com/
Hopefully, I'll have trend data up there soon as well.
Here:
http://www.leenooks.com/page/show/Disks+and+Controllers
No, it was aimed squarely at having a smaller libc than glibc, according to the google guy who was hanging out on #android. It is an "embedded device" with space constraints, you know!
BTW, for those interested in simply avoiding hardware that doesn't work with Linux, this list is fairly active, and includes any and all hardware:
http://www.leenooks.com/
Paying income taxes is one thing, but huge import duties on high tech products is "shooting yourself in the balls" as they say in Italian. Emerging economies have plenty of problems without trying to strangle their tech sectors like that.
Since I've worked pretty hard on it, I'll take a moment or two to promote my own 'platform': Hecl, at http://www.hecl.org./ It's a scripting language built on top of J2ME, which means that no, you probably shouldn't write games with it, but on the other hand, it should make it far easier for the 'average Joe' to actually be able to successfully create an application, and for a good developer to do things much faster than with J2ME.
Also, for fun, I created a prediction market about which platform will dominate, but since it's not played with real money, it's not worth all that much:
http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/6481
+1 to both comments. I have found that most people labelling themselves "ethical hackers" are uhm... it's hard to put this politely... shall we say their bark is louder than their bite?
"It's one thing to go through several days of Googling and HOWTOs when setting up a new OS for the first time."
That was true a while ago, but Linux has made enormous progress since then. Ubuntu is super easy to set up, as easy as windows is most of the time. My wife wrote her doctoral thesis with virtually no assistance from me on her laptop, which runs Ubuntu.
And while you're at it... check out the Apache Software Foundation's OFBiz as well:
http://ofbiz.apache.org/
Caveat: it is neither small nor simple, but it is quite powerful, and has a good community of people around it.
Ok, but even so, you have to make it sustainable, and how to do so is still an open question.
There's no doubt in my mind that open source works, and works well. It has produced some great things, but I think we're still figuring out exactly how it works in terms of the economics. Proprietary software is certainly simpler:
1) Write product.
2) People buy it.
3) Profit!
4) Improve product, hire developers, etc..
Or:
2) No one buys it.
3) Go out of business, product goes away.
With open source, things are different... You could create something great, and there's no guarantee at all that you'll get anything back for it. In practice, people don't seem to get screwed that badly, but it's not as tight a feedback loop.
I wrote some more about this several months ago:
http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/02/03/in
It's a pretty cool little OS, mostly because it's smaller and easier to understand, and hack on, then Linux. That said, it also doesn't do, or even try to do, as much as Linux, so you would want to use it for smaller, simpler devices, most likely.
I am putting together a time tracking system that is free for basic use and comes with a one month trial for the group use features. It's available here:
http://stufftodo.dedasys.com/
It's very simple and straightforward - what it has going for it is that all you have to do is tell it what you're working on via drag and drop, and it keeps track of how long you've been active on the project. Of course, this makes it most suitable for people who are at their computers most of the day, but I guess you can't be everything to everyone.
It is still beta-ish, so pricing is open to negotiation and feature requests are welcome.
Well, except for the fact that the VC's put thousands/millions of dollars (and quite often some of their own) into the idea. These guys just give you a magazine subscription.
To me it sounds like they're copying the advice in "The Innovator's Dilemma" and attempting to hive off an "internal startup", but perhaps they should have done it with people who already had some ideas, plucked from within the organization...
I set up a wiki a while ago in order to track hardware that does not work with Linux and that you should avoid:
http://www.leenooks.com/
It's going pretty well and seems to have become popular enough in its niche that it's not just me maintaining it, and it (almost) pays for the hosting, with adsense.
Good points. Also, while I don't think the question is about outsourced hosting at the cheap end like I discuss, keep in mind that there is something of a "market for lemons" effect:
o ns.html
http://dedasys.com/articles/webhosting_market_lem
Your descendants will thank the AmigaOS team, when it is the only OS capable of running patched together computers that run the defenses keeping the mutants from the forbidden zone at bay. They will be glad that the Amiga team retreated to The Caverns where they continued to pass down the secrets of the OS from generation to generation, memorizing the entire sequence of bytes in the event of a hard drive failure.
... if only someone would throw some money my way to work on Hecl (http://www.hecl.org/) :-)
OFBiz, at http://www.ofbiz.org/ has a POS component, although the whole application might be a bit heavyweight/require some customization/slimming down for your needs. It's worth a look, though.
For stuff to avoid, check out the incompatibility list:
http://www.leenooks.com/
Yeah, it's a proprietary platform, but... 'niche'... depends on how you look at it. At least for J2ME, potential users number in the millions, given the phones out there right now. That's an awful lot of people.
Perhaps you should look at Lisp/Smalltalk/Your favorite academic language not being able to market their way out of a wet paper back:-) If they've had since the 70ies to build something that'll take off, and they haven't, they're doing something wrong, and it sure isn't the languages themselves, because they are very nice indeed.
... while, which is not part of the core language).
Changing subjects, one of *my* favorite "cheap Lisp imitations" (it's Lisp, not LISP) is Tcl:
http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html
which is in some ways more flexible than Ruby - you can redefine existing control structures like if and while, or create new ones of your own (such as do