This is getting a lot of negative reactions. If this causes cperciva not to listen to this post, it will be a Big Tragedy.
A lot of people here are ~saying "maybe cperciva isn't motivated by money". OK. I get that.
Here's the thing - I honestly believe that Tarsnap is the best backup solution. I believe this because I hang around HN, I'm a technologist, and I trust tptacek and patio11, among others, when they say it.
I am right on the edge of someone who would actually use Tarsnap - I'm a geek, but I also run a business, the money it would cost me is less than peanuts (if I could figure out how much it would cost me, that is - see the article). I'm probably not going to use Tarsnap because of a few missing but critical features that patio11 mentioned, like auto-recharging money (do I really need another bullet on my todo list, or to worry about my backups disappearing?).
But there's a whole world of people out there. People who could really, really use Tarsnap. People who have my user data on their systems, and who I wish would use a service as good as Tarsnap. These people will never, ever use Tarsnap, because of all the reasons patio11 mentioned, and because they will never hear of it or know that it's better than everything else.
What I said above has nothing to do with moral philosophy. It is a fact about the world that, if cperciva doesn't play the "marketing game" (or the "make your software useable by normal people" game), less people will use Tarsnap.
And the world will be worse off. Is this a tragedy? Sure. cperciva doesn't owe the world or anyone in it anything. It isn't a moral absolute that giving cperciva more resources, to make Tarsnap that much better, is the right thing to happen.
But I hate to see a whole forum full of people who actually think that what cperciva is doing is somehow more "noble" and less "greedy" because he doesn't care about money. *
* I have no problem with cperciva acting however he wants in this regard, and absolutely do not mean any disrespect. I honestly don't think cperciva owes anyone anything. But I do think that it's an empirical fact that the world will be worse off for less people having used a good backup solution, and I honestly believe that living ina world with more people using Tarsnap, and incidentally cperciva having more money, is a better world. If you really want - donate all that money to GiveWell, and the world will be even better off.
Thank you for eloquently saying what I wanted to say.
It is not about the money. I can guess that his original motivation for creating Tarsnap was to create the most secure backup solution for people who care about their data. The natural progression to this goal would be to let more and more people know about this solution and get them to use it so that data is protected.
Imagine this contrived scenario. Think about all the hospitals storing important health records for patients. Currently, they are not using Tarsnap not because it is technically lacking, but lacking 'business-y' things which are important. What if Colin's hospital mismanages their backup and all records become available to the public.
The irony is that the Colin has solved the hard problem (technical solution) but doesn't want to address the easy problem (business requirements). I sincerely wish Colin would implement these suggestions.
I am seriously thinking of asking to collaborate with him and letting me re-brand Tarsnap and create a backup solution which businesses could buy.
Would you agree the best solution is for cperciva to start a second brand that is purely B2B and more in line with the blog post?
I think the negative reactions stem more from an attraction to the Tarsnap brand as a G2G service combined with cperciva's cavalier attitude toward's increasing his income by charging his customers more. Regardless of patio11's thoughts, the current 'brand' would take a hit by losing the 'geek to geek' luster.
The OP maintains two separate brands for separate products. Maintaining a 'premium B2B' brand for Tarsnap would bypass any negative reaction, I think.
I'm not sure why the majority of the people [OP included] think a single B2B or G2G brand is the 'best option'.
I think a single brand is a better option in this case because it greatly reduces scope, and seeing as it's a one man business scope is the biggest enemy there is. But also because I don't see it as a black and white decision about whether to appeal to geeks or enterprises.
I think patio11 went too far towards the "only appealing to non-geeks" end of the spectrum, partly because he just wanted to show how big of a spectrum there is. It's absolutely possible to have a optimized pricing system, and a well-designed (not talking just visuals) homepage without being anti-geek. For evidence of that just look at Stripe or GitHub. It actually seems like an incredibly rewarding task if cperciva finds the right geek-oriented designer.
Github is the perfect example. Very "pro-geek". But can you imagine if they had appealed to only people who are comfortable with the command-line and with no GUI's? Github is in many ways just a nice GUI and good documentation on top of git, making it more accessible for the average programmer.
And does anyone honestly think the world would be better if git was less widespread?
Perhaps I'm just strange but I wouldn't pay for GitHub and I am the reason that we went with GitLab at $DAY_JOB since its my responsibility to maintain everything Git.
The majority of my coworkers are GitHub's target audience [programmers that do not really want to truly understand how Git works] and they have no active desire to use GitHub. I'm literally the only person that works here with a GitHub account which I barely use because I run a private instance of GitLab instead.
So, while it is a perfect 'mainstream' example, in your eyes...it is also a prime example that there is a significant market that wouldn't use GitHub professionally.
I don't really agree with this characterization of GitHub's target audience. After spending the last 18 months working with a distributed team of ~40 engineers and ~20 bizdev/salesfolk I cannot imagine a suitable replacement for GitHub when it comes to organizing the information surrounding our workflow. I am now in a 2-man startup and it is indispensable for its ticketing and communication features, not to mention helping me figure out when I am most productive. Also, do you realize how great it is for non-coders to "get" GitHub and start using it for critical documents? Iterating through some legal agreements is much clearer when your lawyer/partner now understands what a repo is and how to revert to a previous commit.
That's fine, my comment/explanation could have been clearer.
I was trying to explain that there is two markets for backups/Tarsnap and trying to shoe-horn it into the GitHub comparison led to confusion.
GitHub sounds like it is a SPoF for you is the only reason I'm adding this part of the comment:
If you can't 'imagine' a suitable replacement, I'd try GitLab. They are similar enough I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to replace GitHub in your workflow.
I'm not suggesting you actually replace GitHub, I'm just suggesting you expand your options so you have a backup plan in case GitHub disappears one day.
And there are many enterprises that pay for GitHub Accounts or Private instances of GitHub Software on prem...
Why... Same reason companies pick any other software... Same reason companies pick RHEL over Cent... etc
Support, Security, and outsourced management
If your team has the time to manage your GitLab installation, update it, fix it if/when it breaks, etc. Great. Other organization choose to outsource that to GitLab...
Same thing here with backups... People that want to roll their own inhouse solution would not be TarSnaps target.
Git is as easy to use as scp or rsync from the commandline for most common tasks. So is Tarsnap.
The Tarsnap -> Patio11's Idea is being approximated as equivalent to Git -> GitHub.
So, in this context, the people I've dealt with that would want Patio11's Idea of Tarsnap are people who don't want to take the effort to understand what they are dealing with.
GitHub has a larger audience that has nothing to do with development. Social features, simplifying things for non-developers, etc. but I do not feel that portion of the 'product' is relevant in this context.
The people I know IRL that prefer a GitHub-type interface over doing things with Git via the command line are the type that need me to fix the issues they run into for them. The fact I'm basically git support for other IT folk leads me to that conclusion.
And frankly, I'm not a Git guru. I'm a very, very average software developer who acts as the sysadmin for Dev at $DAY_JOB.
I fully believe other people have different experiences but I've implemented Git workflows at 2 companies now and I've seen a consistent pattern.
Please do understand, I'm not saying they should or need to learn Git. It is better they focus on the domain expertise they bring to the table [e.g. Web Design, Email Design, Data Science]. I'm just saying it is a different audience than Tarsnap's current one.
I'm one of them. For me it's because I made some token efforts before to understand it, and it seemed far more complicated than source control should be. I have very simple needs, and correspondingly don't really have a desire to learn non simple tools.
Perhaps, but realize, that the 'truly paranoid' would not use GitHub's paid offering. They'd have their own private behind the firewalls of an open source product with source code they could examine.
Well, obviously it's not open source, but GH Enterprise is delivered as a running Ruby app, so you can take a look. Of course the TOS says you shouldn't read or reverse engineer or whatever.
But I know people fix bugs that GitHub won't fix in their enterprise product by patching the Ruby source after each new update.
It is very possible and I'm remarkably tempted to do it myself in my free-time.
I also believe that was the intent of Patrick posting this publicly - to stimulate Colin into realizing what people really fucking want and that someone may actually go build a better tarsnap using tarsnap if he doesn't.
I'm sick of Tarsnap's complete disregard for its users; charge more money, listen to your users, improve the product!
WITH ALL OF YOUR SURPLUS MONEY, INSTEAD OF BUYING A $2MILLION DOLLAR MANSION, DONATE IT TO THE FREEBSD FOUNDATION.
Holy shit! What could HE DO FOR FREEBSD with the personal surplus in income from properly implementing Tarsnap as a business!?!?! IT'S FUCKING MIND BOGGLING.
You do it. You're free to become rich yourself and donate half your fortune to the FreeBSD project we all love. Do FreeBSD a favor and make an tarsnap wrapper for businesses who need to pay 1.500 USD monthly to feel secure.
I would love to but I'm building a different company focused on helping people optimize their home energy - I plan to do it (get rich) on that one.
You also mis-characterized what I said. Completely. But whatever, pretty typical Hacker News. It's actually really an interesting dichotomy: there are so many brilliant hackers on here that believe asking for a lot of money for a valuable product and service is evil and yet they're all participating on a forum built and hosted by an organization that specializes in smacking hackers with a fish until they realize the deep and fundamental mistake in that way of thinking.
My argument was that many different kinds of good can be had from the availability of resources and casting resource acquisition in a stigmatic light is cutting innovation off at the knees. All because some less enlightened people figured out how to acquire a lot of resources and use them in non-society friendly ways.
Do you really believe Elon Musk could have turned Tesla into such an awesome company by being Geek2Geek? Fuck no. Elon understands the value of charging for value and how much more value he can usher into the world - so do other amazing entrepreneurs.
I would rather see cperciva acquiring a lot of resources than many other people in the world. I would rather see a lot of people on Hacker News be wealthy people instead the alternatives out there - but they never will be until money and the having of it is no longer stigmatized by them.
For many businesses, $1,500.00 per month to feel secure is pennies. I would rather see Tarsnap, an actually secure service, pulling in that revenue than other "secure" offerings that actually aren't.
To provide some scale reference: my previous company an SEO metrics company had customers paying $1,500.00 per month or more just to know where their customer's URL's were in Google search results.
If there are people willing to pay that much for that, what and who do you think exists out there that would pay 5x that amount to make sure a $25Million class action lawsuit is launched against them? Or to protect hundreds of millions in assets?
If the assets I'm backing up are worth millions to me (tangibly), spending $20,000.00 per month for highly secure and reliable backups is easy.
A lot of people here are ~saying "maybe cperciva isn't motivated by money". OK. I get that.
Here's the thing - I honestly believe that Tarsnap is the best backup solution. I believe this because I hang around HN, I'm a technologist, and I trust tptacek and patio11, among others, when they say it.
I am right on the edge of someone who would actually use Tarsnap - I'm a geek, but I also run a business, the money it would cost me is less than peanuts (if I could figure out how much it would cost me, that is - see the article). I'm probably not going to use Tarsnap because of a few missing but critical features that patio11 mentioned, like auto-recharging money (do I really need another bullet on my todo list, or to worry about my backups disappearing?).
But there's a whole world of people out there. People who could really, really use Tarsnap. People who have my user data on their systems, and who I wish would use a service as good as Tarsnap. These people will never, ever use Tarsnap, because of all the reasons patio11 mentioned, and because they will never hear of it or know that it's better than everything else.
What I said above has nothing to do with moral philosophy. It is a fact about the world that, if cperciva doesn't play the "marketing game" (or the "make your software useable by normal people" game), less people will use Tarsnap.
And the world will be worse off. Is this a tragedy? Sure. cperciva doesn't owe the world or anyone in it anything. It isn't a moral absolute that giving cperciva more resources, to make Tarsnap that much better, is the right thing to happen.
But I hate to see a whole forum full of people who actually think that what cperciva is doing is somehow more "noble" and less "greedy" because he doesn't care about money. *
* I have no problem with cperciva acting however he wants in this regard, and absolutely do not mean any disrespect. I honestly don't think cperciva owes anyone anything. But I do think that it's an empirical fact that the world will be worse off for less people having used a good backup solution, and I honestly believe that living ina world with more people using Tarsnap, and incidentally cperciva having more money, is a better world. If you really want - donate all that money to GiveWell, and the world will be even better off.