
First platform to sell ruby gems? - did
http://www.gemforsale.com/
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jamesbritt
I don't want to get newsletter, I want to read a page that tells me at least
_something_.

This MVP is maybe a bit too M.

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aparadja
Slightly off topic, but I'm curious about the page's design. There have been a
few others with the exact same kind of general vibe (showoff.io comes to mind
first). The grainy background, sunken dark text, the whole thing.

Is it just designers borrowing ideas from each other, or is there something
I've missed?

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did
I don't pretend to be a designer (I know how to use photoshop though) and I
designed this page in 2 hours. I assume I follow the current trends. Nothing
wrong, is it ?

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aparadja
Nothing wrong with the design in my non-designer-opinion. This wasn't meant as
a criticism, I was genuinely curious about the trend.

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stretchwithme
Its great that the ruby community has traditionally made so much code
available for free.

But certainly there must be things that would only be implemented if the costs
of doing so were defrayed.

But it will certainly complicate things like deployment. Will we be putting
license codes into bundler eventually?

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kmfrk
Meanwhile, binpress is a general marketplace for people interesting in buying
code: <http://www.binpress.com/>.

The site submitted lacks any detail whatsoever; they should at least be
bothered to explain their service and its uses to developers and customers
alike. The web design is basically boilerplate for Ruby web services, so it
doesn't add any personal touches.

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erangalp
It doesn't seem too hard to understand what the service does, and they do
explain explicitly in the homepage. Why all the hate?

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kmfrk
There is no "hate", only criticism. Don't be so averse to it.

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senthilnayagam
marketplace for rubygems is a good idea, never thought about it.

Plain old download a gem file and unpack it in vendor in rails app would work
for older projects.

There would be some challenges, how will you install via bundler?, does it
need some authentication for gem download?

~~~
198d
Trivially you could still unpack it into vendor and then use the :path option
when specifying it in your Gemfile.

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nviennot
gem should be free.. I hate this idea. What if I want to fork the code ? And I
don't want to put licenses all around the place when it comes to deployments.

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eropple
Then don't use it.

You have no right to permissively licensed code.

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antidaily
Something off about that logo. Not quite centered?

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ohyes
The plus isn't quite centered it is closer to the $.

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did
he he, thanks for the design feedbacks. I will try to arrange that :-)

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AmrMostafa
Reminded me of <http://gumroad.com/> "Share and sell your digital goods with
just a link"

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jsavimbi
It pretty much contravenes the current community conventions surrounding Ruby
and the sharing of gems. Good luck selling that to a community that was built
by people sharing ideas and code while having them peer-reviewed, who are also
adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code.

~~~
did
first, who speaks for the whole ruby community ? all the ruby/rails developers
are a part of the ruby community but we never signed a paper telling us that
we must not sell snippets of code. Besides, just to remind you something, I
spent an extraordinary number of (not paid) hours on my open source project
which is used by people making money of it (which is fair and I'm totally fine
with that).

Anyway, I don't have in mind to replace the ruby gems platform by something
else which will be not free. really. And trust me, that won't happen because
it won't work.

But, in some situations like mine with LocomotiveCMS, having a platform to
sell modules (it happens that my modules are ruby gems) makes perfectly sense.
And what I'm looking for here by posting this is to see if other people will
be interested in as well.

Believe me, I'm not the evil, not at all

~~~
jsavimbi
Rereading what I wrote, it's clear that I'm not accusing you of being evil,
nor am I speaking for anyone nor am I telling you what the requirements are to
be a part of the Ruby community.

I simply pointed out that your idea contravenes the current community
conventions and that you would have a hard time getting quality developers to
go along with you and contribute as the vast majority derive pleasure from
sharing, modifying, improving and contributing their code to many projects in
the most open and free manner currently possible.

So no, I, for one, am not interested in licensing my work for you to use on
your platform as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-
source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers, I don't believe
that selling gems at $30 here and there contributes in any way, shape or form
to the progress of the community and as a business model, you're offering has
a very low barrier to entry, plus a bad reputation (Hotscripts?).

Yes, people do make money selling plugins. No, I do not foresee the Ruby
community lining up behind that idea as many of us make our money in
implementation, not selling software that we'll need to later support in a
volatile environment.

So again, good luck selling your pay-for-gems model to the Ruby community.

Also, and this is just an aside, but you should really have someone proofread
your work before you broadcast it out like that, and if you're going to be so
defensive when people don't agree with you, maybe you should stick to an
easier business.

~~~
did
Let clear something up. I'm sorry but I reread yours 2 comments and you seemed
to speak for the whole community (I quote: "..to a community...who are also
adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code."). I talked to a
lot of ruby dev and no one told me they were oppposed to my idea. What I'm
saying here is that you do not represent the ruby community, you only speak
for yourself and perhaps your dev friends.

However, there is perhaps a misunderstanding. I don't want to build the mirror
of a paid version of rubygems.com. I simply use the gem workflow mechanism
(which is robust and easy to use) in order to sell modules BUT in the context
of a project (open source or not).

Besides, in php, there already are open source projects successfully working
this way, I'm thinking about prestashop for instance. I also learned that some
companies sells redhat and debian packages. Why not in ruby ?

One last thing, I'm not defensive but your first post was not constructive
enough. You talked about a similar experience you had before (I quote: "... as
experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is
not an ideal solution for my customers"). Could you tell more about that ?
That's the kind of answer I was expecting here. Thanks anyway :-)

