Hacker News Reader

Comment by elsurudo | Hacker News Reader

They should open-source the backend (and hell, the front-end, too). That way you could self-host, or someone else can provide hosting.

View on HN

This. I'm surprised this is the only comment on here suggesting this. It's the most obvious way to gracefully sunset an app.

"This isn't making us any money, it's costing us money to maintain. If you still depend on it, here's the tools that will allow you to continue to depend on it"

I doubt open sourcing something moderately complex is as easy or cheap as that though, particularly if there are other technologies involved that you don't own.

It's one thing to say it should be open sourced but to put further effort into something that's already losing you money just for the love of it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.

They'd need to continue paying for their font license.

"The biggest factor is that we have recurring costs: the sync server and the licensing fees for Ideal Sans, Vesper’s typeface."

They'd need to continue paying for their font license.

Or switch to a free font.

The font is not cheap either*. When you can barely get people to pay $0.99 for a industry leading app, how on earth can you justify paying so much $$ for a font. I mean switch to the closest google / open source version and call it good enough.

[1] http://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/

It's $300/year from what I can see. Not free, but if you think it's a valuable part of your design, a small cost, unless you just don't have a viable business in the first place.

That's hardly a showstopper. They could easily remove the proprietary font when open sourcing. I doubt the heavy users of this app are using solely because the font is beautiful.

I shouldn't have included the font licensing fee (and in fact have since edited the article to remove it). Our annual server fees are 15-20x the cost of the font license.

What I was thinking about was opening sourcing the app. If we do that, we'll have to replace Ideal Sans with another font. The obvious choice would be iOS's system font.

In Brent Simmons' second blog post about shutting down Vesper, he mentions that Open Source is being considered:

> Some people have asked that we make it open source. The request is getting serious consideration, but I can’t make any promises.

> The code is all Objective-C. It’s an iOS 6 app with just enough changes to keep it working on iOS 7 and beyond. It knows nothing about size classes, presentation controllers, and so on. Doesn’t even use auto layout. It’s not an example of how you’d write an app these days.

http://inessential.com/2016/08/21/more_notes_on_vesper

And indeed, six days later they announce their formal plans to release the code as open source

http://inessential.com/2016/08/30/vesper_sync_shutdown_tonig...

I think the other way around would actually be profitable: opensource the front-end to drive adoption, and charge for back-end access.

It's all a red herring anyway, you can't pivot without a single developer.

I doubt that's going to drive a lot of OSS support, if the backend is still proprietary.

I think the GitLab or Nylas model works better for open source companies: open source the whole thing (or most of it), but charge for a hosted solution if you don't want to figure out how to git clone make install.

The GitLab model is actually: open source the whole thing and offer some more exotic features in a commercial enterprise version. The hosting on GitLab.com is free and GitLab only acquired GitHost when GitHost was announcing going out of business.

Maybe you're thinking of Wordpress (Wordpress.com offers paid hosting)?

> Maybe you're thinking of Wordpress (Wordpress.com offers paid hosting)?

Yeah, I keep confusing Wordpress with GitLab. After all, both are MMORPGs. Thanks!

> I doubt that's going to drive a lot of OSS support, if the backend is still proprietary.

There is plenty of support for Google/Dropbox/AWS etc, all proprietary-backend-driven APIs. If the API is good OSS developers don't mind too much, and they can always clone it anyway.

I use tt-rss as a feed reader, and I find it quite attractive that I own the open-source backend (which I self-host), but pay for the front end. I would be far more comfortable with service models like that, where I can know I can get at my data if needs be.

I like the idea in theory but in reality the number of people who can get a somewhat complex backend running on their own is small and the reward (syncing notes) isn't really that compelling so I think it isn't a great idea...

Instead of sun setting the app I'd switch it over to use iCloud (free backend), make it free, and set up a public support forum. This way it'd work and there would not need to be any ongoing investment of time or money.

They should just do whatever other people want, regardless of how comfortable they are with it.

No promises, but we are looking into open-sourcing what we can.

Great, I wish you luck with it. I realize it can seem like a lot of work to do this, but this seems like something all of you loved working on, so it would at least be able to survive in some way or other, and keep some of your users happy.

Even something as simple as a basic code dump (with whatever needs to be removed, removed) would be better than nothing. I'm sure you'd be able to find a steward in someone for this project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com