Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pvg 912 days ago
I don't think there's anything 'unfair' about your price, it's just something I don't want to have to think about yearly for a shell/terminal. One possible workaround is longer term licenses (especially promotionally to early adopters) or a different paid upgrade cadence.

I think the fundamental problem to me is similar to that expressed by some of the other commenters - a vague sense of unease with using a closed source shell/terminal combo. That's much harder to overcome than paying for a shell/terminal combo. Of course, getting reasonably compensated for open source work is an even trickier problem.

1 comments

> a vague sense of unease with using a closed source shell/terminal combo. That's much harder to overcome than paying for a shell/terminal combo. Of course, getting reasonably compensated for open source work is an even trickier problem.

I actually see them compounding... either one alone isn't great, but combine them and you're left with a tool that can be rug-pulled out from under you at any time for any reason. OSS with some monetization gives you a fallback of maintaining it yourself, while commercial non-OSS with a perpetual license at least means you can keep using an old version as long as you can manage. Commercial subscription software is at best ephemeral, and not something I'd invest (time, money, transition effort, etc...) in without a strong fallback option, and even then the benefit offered has to be pretty impressive to overcome those switching costs.

> commercial non-OSS with a perpetual license at least means you can keep using an old version as long as you can manage

That's what hucksh has. Today's license will work with today's code (and code released in the next year) forever. Sorry if that was unclear.

Oh, ok, that's at least more reasonable. Thanks for clarifying. (and for using such a license)

Not really unclear, now that I look closer, I just saw the annual rate and hadn't actually clicked through to the license/pricing details and assumed that to mean a typical SaaS subscription model. (it's cool and all, but not a fit for me based on the direction you're going.)