Thanks for the love! The OS version has not been shitcanned. We spoke about our plans on our podcast 10 days ago: https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemm...
Running 2 software products & working a full time job is hard but we'll get some updates to the OS version. We're likely going to hire a contractor to help us!
Are you porting the SaaS version? Would you be willing to do some kind of paid "license" to run the SaaS version locally?
1) They are different codebases. OS was written in Go by the previous developer. I rewrote everything in Laravel
2) We don't think we'll be porting it to OS but there's no decision on this yet
3) That's a great idea regarding a license, because a lot of people want to self-host... We'll have a think because we've purposely tied our app to certain infastructure, so we'd need to put in significant work to make it transportable. I'm not saying never, I just don't know.
We address some of the complications on the podcast.
These are solid questions, thank you.
I think 3) is interesting, because effectively a huge draw of your product is targeting privacy conscious people, and those are probably the least likely to want to trust a third party for it.
I used https://haveamint.com/ for a while, but it's also been dead for quite a while. I haven't been able to get Piwik to handle my traffic volume.
I don't make anything from my side projects, but I prefer self hosting to know exactly how much data is being collected and reduce it or modify the tracker script as needed, location-respect by hosting analytics data in the same datacentre as the site (so EU users aren't randomly getting analytics ticks sent to US or whatever, some people care, this is just easier for me), and it's really, really cheap to have bulk capacity for me compared to paying a SaaS per pageview - I have about 4 TB of RAM free right now on my (mostly k8s) clusters.
And you're right. There are a segment of people who won't use analytics unless they're self-hosted. Totally understandable. We'll see what happens. It's not on the roadmap in the immediate future but we're not ruling it out.
As far as I can tell the open source version (which hasn't had any updates other than readme changes since earlier this year) is basically on life support. They have no plans to make the new hosted version open source, and only vague plans on hire a contractor in the future to keep the open source version alive. According to the cofounder I spoke with they went back and force about this half a dozen times, which is why their messaging has been so mixed- they had originally said in previous HN and twitter threads that they would open source the new version, but went back on that because they were worried it would take money from their hosted version.
We're looking to make the business sustainable so that we are in this for the long run. Without money, we couldn't spend the same amount of time on it that we are.
And we were definitely bad on the messaging and are going to be more careful in the future as it does cause upset.
If anyone was a troll in that situation it wasn't me ;-)
Paul has publicly admitted that he was wrong on the podcast. It is funny in hindsight. He denied that we said we would OS it then I reminded him that he made the graphic announcing it!
Big mistakes made on the messaging of this and lessons have been learned.