I had a great chat with @rosano earlier this week, and these are notes and links related to our discussion.
We talked about open source licensing.
We had Kyle Mitchell on for an extremely long (almost 2 hour) fire side chat last June:
Lots of links in the event post and comments to more items.
I help moderate Kyle’s Artless Devices forum, which has very in depth discussion on the nuances of open source licensing and its current evolution, as well as independent devs trying out different models of building thriving businesses around open source software.
The recent discussion about the Chalkeaters License is a great example of people creating “fair” non-commercial licenses for works of all kinds, and which I’m personally most excited about for software.
The Prosperity Non-Commercial License is the one I mostly recommend, and some of Fission’s software is licensed under this, most notably Drive.
@rosano’s HyperDraft note taking up is currently sponsor ware. I don’t think that’s the link that Rosano shared but it covers the sentiment: he’ll open source it once a number of people have paid to fund it.
Can remotestorage be self hosted? How hard is this? Maybe build a small remoteStorage server that can be deployed to Heroku for a stronger level of portability?
He moved from Heroku (yay Heroku! Boo container or DO droplet complexity!) to Render because Render supports wildcard subdomains.
OpenFaaS, specifically faasd which doesn’t need Kubernetes, is an open source serverless implementation for managing deployment of small backend scripts. Fission is thinking about what “backend” code to recommend (or host) for those things that still do need small pieces of backend functionality. Picking an open source backend that can be self hosted is important for portability.
We had a longer discussion about sponsored-apps. Are you sponsoring the app? The creator? Similarities to music, and “1000 true fans”.
Shared mission of having users pay for apps. It’s frustrating to have to put in arbitrary pay walls — eg limited number of notes. How to make users feel like they are getting something rather than sponsorship or donation?
Can the funding mechanism be a means to create a communication channel? Can we prompt people to give feedback, ask for help, and in general interact with the creators of apps more fully.
See also This app is "Run by a Human"
Always a pleasure to talk to Rosano. He’s independently championing 0data apps and many other themes that Fission believes in too.