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Comment by pauljarvis | Hacker News Reader

So it's not as easy as just pushing the update to the repo. We are still committed to open-source, but we also have a business to run and need to make a living here (we're two dudes who care about privacy, not a huge company with deep pockets) :)

The community version is getting a full update soon. We just have to focus on profit a bit (this keeps us in business and able to update the repo).

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Speaking as someone who built an analytics business while still maintaining an open source version of the code, I can confirm that it's hard. Sometimes it starts off as one small patch that only makes sense for the hosted service, but you can't push to the OS branch until the code is refactored to protect secrets.

I cannot give you any tips on managing your time between the two, but you may want to consider raising your prices. Back in 2011, we ran our basic account at $50/mo, Business at $150/mo and Enterprise at $CallMe/mo. We could probably have upped that after a year with all the new features we'd put in, but we were acquired before the 2y mark and dropped the first 2 plans.

We still maintain the open source version of the code, but neither of the original founders work on it (for me it's gone back to being a hobby because there are now people paid full time to work on it). We still get questions about the lag in updates. We typically do quarterly bulk pushes to the open source version now.

Thanks for sharing your story. It is hard and we have to fight to not resent OSS because of 0.001% of the OS community. Open-source software has contributed significantly to our lives, and we love it, so we're going to be pursuing OS Version 2 regardless of a few angry people.

Armchair CEO here but charge a fair rate and if that means double do it. People will respect it and pay it if the product or service is helping them make money and I’d rather pay a higher amount and know I’m helping fund a tool that I use to help me be productive than get something cheap.

There's certainly nothing wrong with that. But this sounds a little defensive. And if you're going to promote the "Community Edition"/open-source nature of the codebase, this should probably be made more clear to your users/contributors. (Maybe it is made clear and I'm just not seeing it, though - this is my first time hearing about this product).

I think the defensiveness comes when people put comments such as "I'm a little concerned by the lag in publishing this update". I've never spoken like this in my life to an OS contributor and I use open-source software every day. We're working hard to get the software OS but we were originally planning on keeping the codebases separate (since they were different languages). We only recently pivoted on this after speaking to some wonderful people in the OSS community. Perhaps our communication has been poor, so we'll work on that, but we are working hard at this.

You know, I do wonder why people talk like that these days. I cannot recall a time when it was acceptable and I certainly wouldn't do it myself. But these snide comments are so common on OSS thèse days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

I'm a big fan of fathom and have been using it for my personal sites for about six months now- I've completely ditched Google Analytics and other providers.

When I heard that the new version wasn't going to be open source it was disappointing- both for the simple fact that I value open source, and also for how it wasn't really announced so much as heavily implied until I actually asked. Knowing that you've listened to the community and are going to open source the new version as well is a huge relief for me, and will definitely result in me promoting your product again.

I would say from a communication standpoint things could have been clearer, and I'm sure you'll work on that. From a timeline standpoint I think it would be nice if the open source and hosted versions eventually were released together, but with a full rewrite I also understand that you probably want to clean it up and make sure it's in good shape before doing so. That being said if you want some help with alpha testing the open source version I'd be happy to assist, and I'm sure others would as well.

You are the side of open-source that the world needs. We were going to keep the current repository as-is because it's written in Go, but we'll introduce a new one. Upon announcing that V2 was paid only, people were angry (understandably). We spoke with the community and the consensus was that everyone would prefer that we 'archive' V1 (Golang) and then open-source V2 moving forward. Sorry for the bad communication, it's been challenging with the move between languages!

That makes a ton of sense- you'll be able to get a lot more community support from the PHP community than the Golang one, just do to nature of size (and the fact that PHP is still very much a web language, which targets your audience well). It's been a few years since I was really involved in that community, but I still maintain a few open source projects and keep up with the language- who knows, maybe I'll be able to throw some bug fixes your way.

Speaking as a paying customer of Fathom [1], thank you for your hard work. I know how hard it is to spin up a new business. I for one don't care whether your code is open source or not... I'm paying for the service and the code has no value to me. Please spend your limited time and money on building your business. I don't want the distraction of having to find another analytics platform. ;-)

[1] https://www.agilefluency.org

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