[kenjackson]

One company similar in services to FireBase is FanOut (fanout.io) and they share your open philosophy. Their server code is open source, and they make money by running it for you. I'm optimistic about FanOut and hope that they can be a success based on this model (and their service in general).

[koolkao]

Looks fascinating. Setup of the open source version seems quite involved, are there containers I can use to try it out?

For my applications in healthcare I'm often forced to use in-house servers.

[jkarneges]

If you are using VMs in house, then an easy way to get going with Pushpin is to install Ubuntu Utopic and run "apt-get install pushpin".

It is also available in Debian jessie.