

How To Successfully Compete With OSS in B2C - patio11
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-compete-with-open-source-software/

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patio11
512 MB Slicehost VPS: $38

Wordpress.org software: $0

Knowing that your blog can end up on top page of Reddit and HN simultaneously
without slowdown or swapping: priceless.

(Though I'm sort of glad that I decided to put the blog on its own VPS "just
in case". As in "just in case it gets burned into ashes by a traffic spike,
the people who actually pay me money will be completely unaware of my
technical difficulties happening on the other server").

~~~
callmeed
I assume you had a WP caching plugin installed?

~~~
patio11
Nope.

Previously a few of my other PHP sites had problems under load on the same box
(GoogleBot, or something identifying itself as GoogleBot, went wild once with
100k requests in a day and the Apache child spawnage caused the machine to
swap, starve, and die).

I bumped it up to 512 MB ($250 a year extra cheaper than irked users emailing
me) and added the following to httpd.conf, on the advice of some Slicehost-
related blog post or forum thread or something, can't remember.

<http://www.pastie.org/410707>

No problems since. (I was watching on top through the night, and while the CPU
was spiking up to 25 ~ 50% the memory usage never exceeded 400 MB, and it
ended up not using so much as a kilobyte of swap.)

~~~
aristus
I would make MaxRequestsPerChild nonzero, something like 3000 to 10000. Even
Yahoo, which employs the creator of PHP and several Apache committers,
restarts their Apache children every 8 hours. Otherwise you are making
yourself vulnerable to memory leaks or bugs that might take weeks to manifest.

I would also bump up MaxClients. If it's too low you will refuse connections
under load and never know it -- there will be no records in your logs.

------
patio11
Inspired by the discussion on HN about the recent "I can't compete with OSS"
thread at Business of Software:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505498>

[http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.737375.3...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.737375.30)

------
jrockway
This article actually says nothing about OSS, it just talks about a competing
bingo card generator. He has a competitor that uses Sourceforge for downloads.
He thinks that's inconvenient, so he makes his stuff easier to download. OK,
but the open source project could fix that problem in about thirty seconds.

Marketing is important to pay attention to, but again, it has nothing to do
with open source or closed source. The competing bingo card generator software
could easily kick up the marketing machine a bit, and put this guy out of
business. But they probably don't really care to do that -- they wrote the
software for themselves, and just felt like sharing it with others.

The real message that this article conveys is that the best way to avoid
competition is to do something nobody cares about.

(Also, am I the only one that thinks the UI for his app is horrid? Why is the
word list, the main point of interaction with the application, a tiny drop-
down listbox?)

~~~
patio11
_OK, but the open source project could fix that problem in about thirty
seconds._

I think "Patches welcome." sums it up pretty well.

 _easily kick up the marketing machine a bit, and put this guy out of
business_

There are actually over a dozen competitors already and I still am going to
make a living out of it but, hey, the more the merrier. If you convince them
to kick up the marketing machine could you get them to try AdSense on their
pages, too? It works well for me on the other free competitors.

 _The real message that this article conveys is that the best way to avoid
competition is to do something nobody cares about._

2.6 million elementary school teachers in US, 2.1 million of them female,
average salary $46k, strong continuing employment prospects, minimally BA with
about 40% masters, spend $200 to $400 annually on instructional supplies out
of personal funds.

I know Silicon Valley, programmers, et al thinks that is a whole lot of
nobody. Believe me, that suits me fine -- please continue with doing really
important things like making another social network monetized by CPA ads for
18-34 year old males. I'll be in the cafe working on getting the next 1,500
paying customers.

 _Why is the word list, the main point of interaction with the application, a
tiny drop-down listbox?_

Because the text area confused people -- they'd try to split up cells with
spaces or commas (not possible since other users wanted spaces/commas in their
cells and don't even _think_ about asking these users to learn escape keys),
they'd try to drag in photo albums and wonder why it didn't work, and on 50 ~
250 word lists they had difficulty scrolling up and down to find whether they
had already typed a particular entry or not. For example, if you were playing
US states and capitals bingo, and you forgot whether you had added Montana
yet, there was really no good way to check without all the words being visible
at once.

That was a tricky requirement when some users want over a hundred words
because they understand bingo math and wanted to prolong the game to last a
class period.

Anyhow, alphabetized combo boxes turn out to be very easy to search to verify
presence of a particular item and also completeness of a set of items,
regardless of insertion order. (Alphabetized text areas, on the other hand,
have a nasty feature of making something that someone just typed vanish
inexplicably much of the time. Then the user thinks they did something wrong,
and they get upset.)

------
lionhearted
Patrick - you're insightful and helpful and inspiring. Thanks mate.

