Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

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This is a great example of a business built on what should not really be a business. There are certain types of things that are fundamental to the internet, and trying to sell a premium version of that is always an uphill battle.

Imagine that in 2024 I tried to sell you a web browser. One that maybe has a slightly cleaner UI or some fancy plugin system but ultimately is just a plain old browser. Maybe some very small percentage of people would pay for it, but most are entirely happy with the free and FOSS choices available since the core features of a browser are standard.

RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh, browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice. If you want something fancy or proprietary then sure you should be free to pay for it. But I can’t imagine wanting to build a company that pays salaries around any of this.

There are situations where a person or a team of 2-3 can make a lifestyle business out of selling something that I have seen referred to as “legacy software” (this doesn’t mean old, but rather fundamental and “boring”, aka the Linux kernel). But Feedly competes with its own free product and cannot see the forest for the trees.

While I get where you are going with open source project being the default choice, I don't think it fits the example here.

Feedly, like Google Reader, for me is nothing but a server. It's the same reason I pay for my email, iCloud, and similar services. I am paying for them to store data, run some service, or similar for me.

Even if I went the open source route I would still want a server that is doing the fetching for me. A central place to keep things in sync between multiple devices and to cut down on the data usage when on my phone. That server costs money to run. Either I am running that server myself (and taking on the Maintence of it) or I pay a service like Feedly.

While I agree that Feedly's way of monetization is likely wrong when they could have just run the route of $5 a month and that's it. Nothing fancy, it fetches and thats it. That could be a perfectly sustainable business model.

Edit:

Also I really think we should re-examine "open source should be the default" when the vast majority of open source projects are not at the polish of something like Chromium.

Most average (non technical) consumers are not really going to accept what a lot of open source's experience is. See gimp and open office compared to Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

> RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh,

I must say that reading an RSS feed is as simple as this:

wget "myURL" -O - | python3 -c ' import sys import xml.etree.ElementTree as et tree = et.fromstring(sys.stdin.read()) for el in tree.findall("./channel/item"): print(el.find("title").text)'

But the other applications that you mention are not simple applications:

> browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice.

[1] _ Sample URL: "https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all"

Honestly I struggle to think of a more complicated program than a modern browser that expects to fully support the existing web.

The wild thing is, that’s almost exactly what Netscape was doing back in mid and late 90s. I think the commercial versions (ie the one you bought in a box at Babbage’s or Electronic Boutique), had an HTML editor, and some more integrated file types. I don’t really remember. I never bought it, because the free beta version was enough.

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