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Comment by martin1975 | Hacker News Reader

martin1975

Suppose one was to write a decent webmail front-end, how exactly does one make enough money to sustain its development, even if it's a one or two person effort?

I love open source but there's also a need for developers to live off what they make.

Who has successfully made a webmail front end that they could sell?

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> Who has successfully made a webmail front end that they could sell?

FastMail, but they had to put a whole service behind it.

I wrote a successful Squirrelmail UI for the third largest Austrian ISP then. It was not sold, but used and liked. When I switched to working with cPanel I never thought of bringing along this patch, which was public decades ago, because I had more important things to do.

The other two options, roundcube and horde, which I updated recently at cPanel, are much better.

Same way any venture does: by collecting money from people who want the product to exist. If there are too many freeloaders and not enough contributors, then free licensing is not a viable option. Development of the software can still be done in a public repo.

protonmail won my business (which is extremely hard to do because I'm a cheap) and I've been using the internet since 1992. I use to run elm on a terminal. They also have a VPN and when you email support, you basically get a 3rd level engineer response within an hour. I forward all my gmail mail to my proton account, and use it for personal and one of my business. I keep banking and bills on gmail for now.

Protonmail has no full-text search nor spam detection.

Which you probably don't notice because you forward Gmail -> Protonmail. ;)

I use ProtonMail and don't forward through GMail. Spam isn't an issue, and the available search is good enough.

ProtonMail is easily one of the best mail services I've used; particularly now that there's an IMAP bridge.

https://www.mailpile.is/

“Community funded and supported”

It's quite nice but I wouldn't consider it production ready really... I contribute to it every now and then

One example is Open-Xchange [https://www.open-xchange.com]

They make an open source webmail + drive + docs suite, and sell a commercial version (e.g. to ISPs). The software is great and they're still around, so it must be working out for them.

I think the rainloop developers make some income from support and custom installations.

IMO this is the best way to go for an open-source project.

What about https://sogo.nu ?

sogo stable builds are closed.

Making a living, or even half a living, off open source development would be a dream.

In the specific case of webmail[1], I would offer hosted instances.

OTOH, a need to commercialize a FOSS-project is always a latent conflict of interest and I personally only reluctantly make such software part of my stack: I might end up with core devs moving to a proprietary fork full time and not enough other devs to "just fork it".

[1] when did this even become a word?

As to the usage of the word 'webmail', I'd say it's been in techno-parlance for a long time, masquerading as recommended DNS settings.

By 'long time', I mean at least since the mid-to-late 90s. I would often see the word -- not in regular writing, but in tutorials, all the time. Setting up a cPanel instance, for example, you would often be instructed to set up your MX records as 'mail.yourdomain.tld', and your CNAME as 'webmail.yourdomain.tld', just so you'd have something convenient to type in your browser.

There was a time when reading email on the web was not a thing [0]. Reading mail on the web - as a new feature - is "webmail".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client)

> [1] when did this even become a word?

Around 1996-7? Right around the time that HoTMaiL came about.

Fun trivia, it was built on pretty much 100% freebsd, before Microsoft acquired it.

Yep, I can still remember the clusterf#ck migration to Win2K.

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