Why open source matter for privacy analytics

Håkan Nylén — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 07:54:41 +0000

Open source has existed for some time now. It is also starting to become mainstream, which is great. But it has even started becoming a bit of a gray area, with services going in different directions to feel they have the right to call themselves privacy-friendly. As a founder of the new privacy-focused analytics service, Kindmetrics, I know from own experience.

Auditing

You should not have to take someone on their word that they will take good care of your data. It will like in a movie—how often does everything end up fine when a character says that they should be trusted? You should have the right to see for yourself if they stand by privacy norms and handle data, both yours and your visitors', as safely as is possible.

Trust only yourself.

Push the project in the right direction

If you have audited the project and seen some mistakes or have ideas to do things better, or if you can't code, you can have a feature request. Feel free to join and help push the project forward in the direction you want. That is part of open source. If you need something and know how to code, you can always build it and ask to add it to the project. They should align with the idealogy and plans of the project; those usually exist in the description or the issues.

Take Kindmetrics as an example. Kindmetrics probably has bugs or some miscalculations on the fundamentals, and I am always open to a bug report or a fix by some Kindmetrics user. I cannot be perfect, and open-source help makes the project better for you and your visitors.

But if they can self-host it, then we won't get the money.

That rationale is typically what most companies or people use to justify their decision not to open source. Take Fathom, a competitor to Kindmetrics, as an example. They have an episode on their podcast where they explain why they decided not to make the new version of their service open source because "paid users have to come first."1

Of course, I agree with them, but I don't see this as a valid point to not do open source. Support handles well in open source as well. You can easily handle small issues and support without taking a lot of time. If someone needs more significant help, say, setting up the service, I can offer a support package with time-based or fixed pricing. I value my time, and many open-source services also do this.

If it is the same code base, paid users and open-source users will most likely touch the same bugs, so you will prioritize those that have the most impact. So indirectly you will help both. Kindmetrics is also using docker for deployment and for publishing the service, making it easy to have straightforward releases and deployments.

You won't lose customers as well. Those who self-host would most likely not pay for your service anyway. If they won't, let them use Kindmetrics anyway to build a relationship and make them happy with Kindmetrics instead. They could become ambassadors for Kindmetrics that way.

Thanks for reading. You can check Kindmetrics, simple privacy website analytics. The GitHub repo is github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics.

What happened with Dirble

Håkan Nylén — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 11:58:36 +0000

I am the former owner and the founder of Dirble. I worked on Dirble from 2011 to 2019 on it with around 4–5 months in profit. The rest I paid from my own pocket to keep the whole service up and running.

Dirble was an amazing service, built to be your backend to handle all internet radio stations with search, categories, played songs and album covers. first it was built in PHP with Codeigniter and then in ruby with Ruby On Rails. A lot of systems and apps used Dirble to handle thousands of radio stations to their users. I got jobs referring to Dirble on my Resume.

Services like Rune Audio was using Dirble. You could buy a php code that was more or less a clone of Dirble, using Dirble's api. And you could use Iphone apps like soundseeder that was using Dirble's api for internet radio stations. And many more.

Now Dirble haven't been up since summer 2019. I will now tell you why.

I started getting tired of Dirble, it was a cool technical solution I was proud of but it have been costing a lot privately and I wanted to spend less time on it and spend more time on my future projects. I also felt stressed to losing revenue and some months here and there pay from my own pocket to make Dirble Survive. I was more or less tired of making excuses to my then fiancee, now wife, where all the money disappeared.

Then I got a mail of a young guy in USA wanting to buy Dirble for a okay sum, based on that the Dirble was going plus-minus 0. I accepted and prepared a 4 month long transfer of the project with some hiccups on the way.

I didn't announce this as we thought of the new owner should announce it together with me.

The transfer was done at around February 2019. I saw Dirble up and running and was waiting for the announcement. Nothing happened. Thought the new owner was busy and let it go, it is his property now so I guess it is fine.

Then in summer Dirble was down and I felt pretty sad. I thought it would flourish now with someone with more money and emotion to this service that I had.

Dirble has been down since then.

I am sorry for every platform, app using Dirble that now have to go to someone else that is most likely worse than Dirble to handle their internet radio.

I am also sorry for the end users, the people that used with or without knowing they was using Dirble.

I am also missing those developers trying to steal all the data on Dirble and I had to send out angry emails. That was stressful but in retrospect, I do miss that.

What I am trying to say is that I wish it could gone better and I hope everyone can accept my apologies. This should have gone smoother and more transparent.

My learning is to be more transparent but also with my future projects being clear why people have to pay for the service, so I can continue on it and maybe make a career and live on the project.

And once, again, sorry.

DEV Community: Håkan Nylén

Why open source matter for privacy analytics

Auditing

Push the project in the right direction

But if they can self-host it, then we won't get the money.

What happened with Dirble