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I'm nearing feature completion of a command-line tool that I hope will enable me to pay my rent myself. There are many services that provide online stores; which would be the best for me?
I expect to provide installers for .deb and .rpm Linuxes (Linuces?), *BSD, Mac OS X and Windows. The user will select the platform, pay then download the installer.
I expect I'll provide a time-limited demo.
It won't have DRM as I'm convinced someone would just crack it. And really DRM sounds like a PITA from my perspective. The product will be inexpensive; I have the hope that most people would rather pay than have to figure out how to download a "liberated" product.
The eCommerce services I've checked out so far enable the sale of physical products as well as Software as a Service.
I am less concerned with the cost of my store provided I can still make a profit.
I'm not going to sell it through Apple's App Store because I don't want to deal with the sandbox. I expect most of my users will be comfortable with command-lines; I don't forsee them wanting to shop at the App Store.
I hope to go Alpha in a week.
[In consideration of other Soylentils who may have a product with a GUI, or even this submitter should they decide to add one, what other store(s) would you recommend? -Ed.]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:37PM
There are many services that provide online stores; which would be the best for me?
I expect to provide installers for .deb and .rpm Linuxes (Linuces?), *BSD, Mac OS X and Windows.
"many" ... Care to list them? The difficulty is the requirement for multiple OS.
I mean, at one side of the scale there's pay money for an unlock code and its all handled in the application code which is how Cepstral does its licenses for voices and it works for me. Anyone can download and run a closed source binary but only people with a valid unlock code get a useful result. Cepstral "Diane" is my voice for my misterhouse install that must be 20 yrs old now (updated occasionally of course). She's not quite Rommie (oh bad 90s SF reference) but she's hot enough to wake me up in the morning and stuff.
On the other end of the scale, just to supply packages for most freebsd users on different versions and different architectures, you're gonna have all kinds of fun setting up a public accessible Poudriere recompiler for common versions and architectures and then your installer will mess with /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/MDC.conf which is kinda the logical equivalent of a debian-style /etc/apt/sources.list.d/something.list file. Then pkg install wtf-mdc and it'll work. Now do that level of BS for five different OS you list, its no laughing matter. Also I'm not even sure the Poudriere / pkg solution under freebsd even supports user logins so you might be in for some weirdness.
Some years ago I daydreamed kinda of starting a company that would basically be jenkins/gentoo for the masses... now why burn laptop battery (and thermally burn lap) by compiling locally when you could SaaS send VLM a bit of monthly cash and I'd compile software for you with crazy options in a nice cool data center on a giant fast server for you to download. Some marketing estimates of likely sales volume came back "WTF" so that went no where. Anyone intelligent enough to come up with useful non-default options is smart enough to cut me out of the loop, there's no killer options, the ratio of CPU and disk I'd require per user varies over maybe 6 orders of magnitude but what people are willing to pay doesn't vary much, etc.. Well anyway that's what led me to research how many OS can handle 3rd party repos a couple years ago, which was a fun intellectual exercise although not terribly useful.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:22PM
Andromeda was on from 2000-2005. So, bad "noughties" SF reference. The first three seasons weren't that bad though.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ