Absolutley. This is a non-obvious but simple idea executed well and the creator deserves to make buckets of money.
Where are my buckets of money? Oh yeah, I don't care.
If a fancy website is all I need, I guess that's what I'll be doing this weekend. And I guess SSL and CNAME support...
On a positive note, this is the first time I thought about doing something like this, and it's also the first time I heard about your project.
I'll try it out, thanks!
To be fair, the "fancy website" is a byproduct of designers who like to make stuff look good, and the rest of Showoff's team caring very much about not just making stuff that works (of which they make a lot, much of which is hidden away in obscurity), but about making it easy for people to use who wouldn't perhaps take on the task themselves—and I don't think there is anything at all wrong with that.
However, I don't think it is fair to imply creating this tool (and its website) was a product of caring about money, or duplicating and obscuring your (or anyone else's) efforts. It is like many other ideas out there that came from a real need, hacking it together, and then asking if people might find it useful enough to pay for it. That's not a reason to disparage or diminish a job well done.
In the end, it looks like Showoff's also brought attention to your project, pagekite, and plenty of other ways people have shared to do the same thing. Today was the first time I'd heard of localtunnel, but I've done this same bit of showing off localhost before for clients and coworkers on my own--and it's a bit like splitting hairs to call it duplication. Hackers hack. It's what we do. I definitely like open sourcing when it makes sense. But I also like to eat and have a roof over my head. Open source does not hold a monopoly on good intentions.
The idea is clearly communicated, pros and cons and alternatives discussed... and now it's a tiny bit easier to explain to people what we are doing.
Hats off to the Showoff team for a job well done! :-)
It's great to have the idea validated, especially since mine and showoff.io's user experience are nearly identical. And this will force me to make a pretty homepage and add features.
So now that I've complained, I don't think I can complain much more.
Now... open source vs commercial, that's a whole different discussion (although probably not what you'd expect).
Casually suggesting NIH can be an insult to the intellectual & creative abilities of a team. Sometimes it is warranted. Other times, it is not. I believe most guys and gals in the developer community are astute enough to ferret out NIH and ignore it.
P.S. On the other hand, you have a very impressive set of github repos. Kudos. You have successfully made me both care and jealous that I never get around to open-sourcing anything because I never feel like any side project is perfect enough to let others see (and because most of what I work on is closed-source for clients). Sad.
The whole simultaneous invention thing is really interesting to me. It was covered in two great books, What Technology Wants and Where Good Ideas Come From. Both seem to imply that the more utility something has in the "adjacent possible", the more likely it will be invented by many people in roughly the same time period. This actually quite frustrates me about technology! What's worse is that this phenomenon will only increase over time. And because it's about utility (never mind the illusion of unique "UX" of products now), there is little room for expression or creating something unique to you that matters.
Marketing is critical. And marketing isn't just telling people about it, or advertising. Marketing is making a site that is attractive (to the audience), giving your project a name that is easy to understand and remember, and easy to google for, and making it easy to use, to install, work with it, share it, troubleshoot it, making it easy to find help, easy to find other people who use it in a community. Marketing means making it clear as hell what the user gets out of your "product," and keeping the focus on the user at all times.
These are all relative, depending on your audience. (Ex: Lots of developer types actively enjoy the simplest possible visual design, and enjoy the thrill of conquering something that's a little bit technically hard. But not all. And none of them enjoy searching & searching and being unable to find the thing.)
If you don't to make money off your work, great. But if you want people to use it, you have to market it, that's just the way it works. It's not good enough to simply make something you want to make and stick it out there. Just being "free" and "open" isn't enough.
If more open source developers would take the time to learn how to effectively promote their own work, the world would be a better place. But sadly, because most OSS developers belong to a group that considers marketing "evil," and has a chip-on-the-shoulder reaction to the idea that marketing is required for even free-as-in-beer projects, it won't happen.
I know it's human nature to like prettier things, I'm just surprised when localtunnel was posted on Hacker News originally, it did not get as much attention as showoff.io and it does the EXACT same thing. I guess I'm disappointed in the community for that?