Nobody likes being rugpulled. But lately, it's going around like a virus.Why are so many former open source darlings selling out or relicensing? And is there...
How do you suggest self-hosting should be made easier while at the same time making offering the same software as a service harder?
Basically the bits that are hard for people about self-hosting is that you need to learn about concepts you have no previous experience with. This can only be mitigated by abstracting those concepts away to some degree and automating more but those are exactly the same steps that make offering the software as a service easier too.
If a software is easy to self host, then there is no need to make it harder to deploy as SaaS. The latter will be irrelevant for most people.
And the problem of self hosting isn’t a circular problem as you project it to be. There are architectural changes that can make it positively easier to self host without exposing the sysadmin to needless complexity. The example I quoted before - sandstorm - was a step in this direction. Deploying and administering applications on sandstorm would have been as easy as deploying one on desktop (including cross app integrations). The change needed was to modify the app to work with the sandstorm platform. Unfortunately, the platform didn’t gain the momentum needed to ensure that all available apps would be ported. But it shows that the concept is viable.
Self-hosting has some inherent downsides that will never make it so easy that it completely outclasses the competition by cheap mass-hosters hosting the exact same thing for most people. You or I might enjoy fiddling with technical things or keeping our computers running 24/7 or setting up some workaround CGNAT or DualStack Lite so that computer is even reachable from the outside (or even have a physically stationary computer in the first place, lots of people carry laptops around instead or don’t even have anything but a phone) but most people would much rather pay someone US$1 a month to do all that stuff for them.
My sincere belief is that the difficulty in self hosting is due to the lack of priority, investment and development, due to the perverse incentives of the SaaS model. I don’t think it’s a technical problem that cannot be resolved with sufficient work. There are PoCs that prove that it can be made as simple as desktops and mobile phones.
How do you suggest self-hosting should be made easier while at the same time making offering the same software as a service harder?
Basically the bits that are hard for people about self-hosting is that you need to learn about concepts you have no previous experience with. This can only be mitigated by abstracting those concepts away to some degree and automating more but those are exactly the same steps that make offering the software as a service easier too.
I have to disagree with both those assertions.
If a software is easy to self host, then there is no need to make it harder to deploy as SaaS. The latter will be irrelevant for most people.
And the problem of self hosting isn’t a circular problem as you project it to be. There are architectural changes that can make it positively easier to self host without exposing the sysadmin to needless complexity. The example I quoted before - sandstorm - was a step in this direction. Deploying and administering applications on sandstorm would have been as easy as deploying one on desktop (including cross app integrations). The change needed was to modify the app to work with the sandstorm platform. Unfortunately, the platform didn’t gain the momentum needed to ensure that all available apps would be ported. But it shows that the concept is viable.
Self-hosting has some inherent downsides that will never make it so easy that it completely outclasses the competition by cheap mass-hosters hosting the exact same thing for most people. You or I might enjoy fiddling with technical things or keeping our computers running 24/7 or setting up some workaround CGNAT or DualStack Lite so that computer is even reachable from the outside (or even have a physically stationary computer in the first place, lots of people carry laptops around instead or don’t even have anything but a phone) but most people would much rather pay someone US$1 a month to do all that stuff for them.
My sincere belief is that the difficulty in self hosting is due to the lack of priority, investment and development, due to the perverse incentives of the SaaS model. I don’t think it’s a technical problem that cannot be resolved with sufficient work. There are PoCs that prove that it can be made as simple as desktops and mobile phones.