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Comment by ensignavenger | Hacker News Reader

If some one is going through the trouble of self hosting, why would they want to use a closed source proprietary OS to do it? Most of the apps available for this are open source, so why not host them on an open source system and not have any vendor lock-in?

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Umbrel's source code is public and there's no vendor lock-in: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel

The license forbids me to hire another vendor to service the product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in.

> The license forbids me to hire another vendor to service the product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in.

Where in the license does it forbid such a thing? Commercial use != an individual paying for third party support/service/development.

I don't know what the intended definition of Commercial is, as it is not defined in the license, but the common definition is:

>> used for selling goods or providing services for money, rather than for personal use

(https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/commerci...)

An individual being paid to provide a service is commercial under that, and most legal definitions of the word.

> An individual being paid to provide a service is commercial under that, and most legal definitions of the word.

The license only forbids third-party to offer Umbrel by themselves. If you pay for hosting, and install it on your own, it would be fine.

There is a License FAQ [0], in which it says:

> Selling Umbrel, including selling cloud-hosted instances with Umbrel or its derivates, home server hardware with Umbrel or its derivates, support services for Umbrel or its derivates, etc is not permitted under our license.

[0]: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/wiki/License-FAQ

Sounds like it's against someone else selling Umbrel to you; Not you going to someone and saying "Set this up for me".

That sounds like a support service for Umbrel.

They want something with good UI/UX and that is maintained and that they don't have to spend hours a week futzing around with?

There is nothing "free as in beer" that even comes close to this in polish. This is gorgeous.

There are plenty of Open Source solutions that fit that description. Of course what one person thinks of as 'good' another may think is 'bad' and there may be enough folks who think the same way as the Umbrel folks to make it work. I certainly wish them well in their endeavors.

self hosting doesn't always mean opensource. could be people wanting to have control of their data. there are many closed source self hosting apps - emby, plex, confluence/jira, teamspeak, filerun to name a few.

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