Michael Herrmann, maker of the fman dual-pane file manager, writes about building and selling a small desktop app.
HN commenters recommend fman as a well-made indie tool and praise it as an example of a small company making a living.
The section "TUI : Text-based User Interfaces" resonates with me strongly, and is somewhat relevant to the WTF thread[1] from yesterday, in particular this subthread[2] about GUI vs TUI.
Compare the statements:
> terminal protocols are ghastly display server protocols in disguise
vs
> > At what point do we just say why not 'install a modern GUI'?
> I have yet to see a modern GUI that didn't put pretty little animations a higher priority than being modular and configurable and having as much or as little data density as I desire
> Command lines[3], on the other hand, do it natively if not intuitively.
Which brings up few interesting observations:
* Terminal vs graphical is almost completely orthogonal and an implementation detail. There are plenty of WIMPy style[4] TUI/ncurses applications, and also various forms of commandlines/repls that are natively graphical.
* I'd argue that there are few other categories that are less often recognized, namely "keystroke-driven" and "web style" (nomenclature is mine and not fully though out).
* The characteristic attributes of "keystroke-driven" is full interactivity (in contrast to command-line) but where typically there are no (or minimal) interactive elements on-screen. Some examples off my head would be VisiData[5], tdo[6], fman[7]. These types of applications tend to have very high data densities (what the commenter above desired)
* "Web style" applications is more ambiguous (and debatable) category, but I think there is…
Non-commercial clauses seem to be a good fit for software that is someone's "day job" where they charge for licenses. It's not common, but I've run across the following projects:
Duplicacy by Gilbert Chen https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy
Dome by Federico Milano http://faraday1.ucd.ie/dome.html
Fman by Michael Herrmann https://fman.io
From what I've gathered, success has been mixed. Duplicacy seems to be doing well based on forum activity and release history. Fman never made much money. If I recall correctly the Fman author was turned off by the number of people who criticized it for being fully open-source and wished he'd stuck with a closed-source full commercial model. I'd like for the open-source community to be more accepting of this model as there is potential value in it. As an example, Mathematica still refuses to let anyone not employed by the company see the source code, which creates a reproducibility/validation problem for math researchers. While Steven Wolfram understandably rejects pleas to make the software FOSS, there is real benefit in letting people see the code.
Edit: Fixed names
You release fman on Linux, so you use at least some open source libraries. I wonder which ones are those and what is your policy of transferring a share of your earnings from your project to them.
Also I suggest anybody using this software with a paid subscription to evaluate this bit from the EULA:
> fman is provided as-is. You are using it at your sole risk. We give no warranty of any kind. You agree that we shall not be liable for any damages related to fman.
Source: https://fman.io/eula
Also, stop this FUD already. Anybody can release software however they want, free, libre or not, but this attitude that I quote from your link is plain wrong.
> We all like free stuff. But in a world where everything is free, we are the product.
We're talking about FOSS software here, not about Facebook or Google. If you don't want people "bashing a little guy who's trying to innovate", you can quit spreading misinformation about people whose gratutiuous libraries and kernels you use (yes every platform you release to uses FOSS somewhere).
>If you're interested in a little history: https://fman.io/blog/dual-pane-file-manager-history/
Thank you, though I knew most of those info as - unfortunately - I was there, in the sense that I was in my twenties when NC came out, I practically started my computing experience at work using NC and I couldn't imagine doing some tasks without a dual pane filemanager, and when the NC was killed by Symantec I mourned the loss (and quickly found some decent alternatives, the one with the most "NC feeling" being IMHO DN - Dos Navigator and later NDN - Necoromancer's Dos Navigator).
As a side note, what not everyone knows/noticed, 7-zip it is also a (almost orthodox) dual pane file manager, very handy to manage, besides files residing on mounted filesystems also those inside archives (obviously) and those inside disk/disc/drive images, such as .iso, .img and similar.
I would suggest just removing it. Debian/Linux have a system wide update mechanism for everything - the OS & apps - and it's very strongly preferred that you just use that.
The UX of asking stuff during install is also pretty bad - and goes against the grain; it's vanishingly rare that Linux install packages ask questions. Even if you make it a startup/in-app/config option, it would also be a strange question to ask on Linux:
Would you like auto-updates? Of course, everything on linux auto-updates, why do you ask? No - I mean would you like me to force-update just fman everyday? What? No!
Also, don't forget to update this page while you're at it: https://fman.io/docs/obtaining-updates
Thanks! I enjoy doing both and have enough bandwidth to provide consultancy for others while also working on my own projects. For Checkbot, it can take weeks to see the impact of changes to on-boarding, pricing, SEO, UX etc. so I have time for other activities. Checkbot has also helped me connect with companies that need help getting their own SaaS products polished and ready to launch.
I enjoyed your posts on your journey with fman on https://fman.io/blog/ by the way. Selling software as opposed to only coding it has its own set of challenges for sure.