The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer
Of course you&#x27;re going to hear supportive friendly things from your friends. It&#x27;s much harder to tell someone a hard truth if you see them as your friend and want the best for them.<p>Here&#x27;s a blunt truth. If it&#x27;s easy for me to ditch your product, your product has no value. 90% of the comments here on HN amounted to &quot;gee, I guess I have to spend an extra 20 minutes configuring Nginx now.&quot; Solving 20 minutes of Nginx configuration is not a viable business. System configuration is handled by some Puppet library author. Who&#x27;s going to spend $100 on your product so they don&#x27;t have to spend $20 on a non-free SSL certificate?<p>You&#x27;re friends with the RethinkDB developers? The moral of their story was <i>even</i> if you have a compelling product, <i>even</i> if you have an interesting niche, <i>even</i> if you give it away for free, <i>even</i> if you give away the source code, <i>even</i> if you have features nobody else has, if you are entering a saturated market you are facing a massive, time-consuming, expensive up-hill battle. Moving away from RethinkDB to Postgres is <i>hard</i>. There are things RethinkDB does that Postgres just doesn&#x27;t do. But people did this anyway instead of paying, instead of contributing.<p>Moving away from Caddy is <i>simple</i>. Your product barely even exists. That&#x27;s why you&#x27;re having trouble making money. Solve a real problem and you&#x27;ll make real money.