First platform to sell ruby gems? | Hacker News Reader

First platform to sell ruby gems?

gemforsale.com

22 pointsdid23 comments

I don't want to get newsletter, I want to read a page that tells me at least something.

This MVP is maybe a bit too M.

Slightly off topic, but I'm curious about the page's design. There have been a few others with the exact same kind of general vibe (showoff.io comes to mind first). The grainy background, sunken dark text, the whole thing.

Is it just designers borrowing ideas from each other, or is there something I've missed?

Not quite the same, but there was a lot of love for Tweetie's sunken logo (http://i.imgur.com/u6u4v.png). Twitter bought that app out and started using their fat bird instead :'(

I don't pretend to be a designer (I know how to use photoshop though) and I designed this page in 2 hours. I assume I follow the current trends. Nothing wrong, is it ?

Nothing wrong with the design in my non-designer-opinion. This wasn't meant as a criticism, I was genuinely curious about the trend.

Its great that the ruby community has traditionally made so much code available for free.

But certainly there must be things that would only be implemented if the costs of doing so were defrayed.

But it will certainly complicate things like deployment. Will we be putting license codes into bundler eventually?

Meanwhile, binpress is a general marketplace for people interesting in buying code: http://www.binpress.com/.

The site submitted lacks any detail whatsoever; they should at least be bothered to explain their service and its uses to developers and customers alike. The web design is basically boilerplate for Ruby web services, so it doesn't add any personal touches.

It doesn't seem too hard to understand what the service does, and they do explain explicitly in the homepage. Why all the hate?

There is no "hate", only criticism. Don't be so averse to it.

marketplace for rubygems is a good idea, never thought about it.

Plain old download a gem file and unpack it in vendor in rails app would work for older projects.

There would be some challenges, how will you install via bundler?, does it need some authentication for gem download?

Trivially you could still unpack it into vendor and then use the :path option when specifying it in your Gemfile.

gem should be free.. I hate this idea. What if I want to fork the code ? And I don't want to put licenses all around the place when it comes to deployments.

Then don't use it.

You have no right to permissively licensed code.

I should have explained the context of the idea. I just wanted to sell a tool for my cms (locomotivecms). This tool happens to be a ruby script which is regularly updated and that I want to sell to "finance" the cms (free of charge since it's an open source project). And the best way I found is to sell it as a ruby gem so that the installation / update become easy for the ruby users.

By the way, the code is not obfuscated. So yes, basically, users who paid for the gems can put this in their own git repository and do "whatever" they want with it as long as they don't share it.

Does it make sense ?

Something off about that logo. Not quite centered?

The equal sign is a little to the left of the plus sign.

It looks like the gem, + and $ are equally spaced but visually its not balanced because the gem is so big.

The plus isn't quite centered it is closer to the $.

he he, thanks for the design feedbacks. I will try to arrange that :-)

Reminded me of http://gumroad.com/ "Share and sell your digital goods with just a link"

It pretty much contravenes the current community conventions surrounding Ruby and the sharing of gems. Good luck selling that to a community that was built by people sharing ideas and code while having them peer-reviewed, who are also adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code.

first, who speaks for the whole ruby community ? all the ruby/rails developers are a part of the ruby community but we never signed a paper telling us that we must not sell snippets of code. Besides, just to remind you something, I spent an extraordinary number of (not paid) hours on my open source project which is used by people making money of it (which is fair and I'm totally fine with that).

Anyway, I don't have in mind to replace the ruby gems platform by something else which will be not free. really. And trust me, that won't happen because it won't work.

But, in some situations like mine with LocomotiveCMS, having a platform to sell modules (it happens that my modules are ruby gems) makes perfectly sense. And what I'm looking for here by posting this is to see if other people will be interested in as well.

Believe me, I'm not the evil, not at all

Rereading what I wrote, it's clear that I'm not accusing you of being evil, nor am I speaking for anyone nor am I telling you what the requirements are to be a part of the Ruby community.

I simply pointed out that your idea contravenes the current community conventions and that you would have a hard time getting quality developers to go along with you and contribute as the vast majority derive pleasure from sharing, modifying, improving and contributing their code to many projects in the most open and free manner currently possible.

So no, I, for one, am not interested in licensing my work for you to use on your platform as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers, I don't believe that selling gems at $30 here and there contributes in any way, shape or form to the progress of the community and as a business model, you're offering has a very low barrier to entry, plus a bad reputation (Hotscripts?).

Yes, people do make money selling plugins. No, I do not foresee the Ruby community lining up behind that idea as many of us make our money in implementation, not selling software that we'll need to later support in a volatile environment.

So again, good luck selling your pay-for-gems model to the Ruby community.

Also, and this is just an aside, but you should really have someone proofread your work before you broadcast it out like that, and if you're going to be so defensive when people don't agree with you, maybe you should stick to an easier business.

Let clear something up. I'm sorry but I reread yours 2 comments and you seemed to speak for the whole community (I quote: "..to a community...who are also adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code."). I talked to a lot of ruby dev and no one told me they were oppposed to my idea. What I'm saying here is that you do not represent the ruby community, you only speak for yourself and perhaps your dev friends.

However, there is perhaps a misunderstanding. I don't want to build the mirror of a paid version of rubygems.com. I simply use the gem workflow mechanism (which is robust and easy to use) in order to sell modules BUT in the context of a project (open source or not).

Besides, in php, there already are open source projects successfully working this way, I'm thinking about prestashop for instance. I also learned that some companies sells redhat and debian packages. Why not in ruby ?

One last thing, I'm not defensive but your first post was not constructive enough. You talked about a similar experience you had before (I quote: "... as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers"). Could you tell more about that ? That's the kind of answer I was expecting here. Thanks anyway :-)

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