Dear FreeBSD crowd. I'm very grateful for the help provided over the past years on this forum, which allowed me to slowly acquaint myself with FreeBSD and finally move away from Linux on both servers and my Desktop. This forum too, even if my posts were infrequent, was the most welcoming community online I've seen in years. And so, I was hoping, you may be able to advise me (or rather us, in this case) on one more thing.
We're a very small team of enthusiasts working on a free & open-source tool called
However, we have 0 (zero) funding. We don't expect to find it here, rather your wise advise would suffice. Everything the project can do, you can read on the frontpage - here, I wanted to share a few more things and ask you a few questions.
2. Talking to some more or less wealthy folks, both technical and non-technical, they seemed to be interested in various aspects of this project, but no one seemed to be interested dropping even $5k out of their, say, $10mil we sort of figured they had had. Our goal is actually quite modest: $70k for 6 months with a very detailed plan (yet to be posted). But, those were NOT random folks we spoke to - we were on good terms with them, knew them. Each of our team members had about the same experience: they'd known a person for years, they'd help them when that person needed help, but once asked for help, well, it'd be mostly silence. Even given that some of them understood potential benefits for themselves. We tried both "the donation" and "the commercial" approaches. None worked. Don't think any of us are holding any grudges - it's just that we now know how things work with people, who have money. They aren't being stingy. They aren't hoarding. They aren't spending them on passion projects of their own... they just, sit on it. And that's a fact of life.
3. The reason PFC was conceived was because upon noticing Docker, I decided, I needed the same, but for FreeBSD-jails. And then realizing that it can be done for pretty much anything (and not just BSD-jails or Docker) without introducing much additional complexity formed the final idea. But development is development - It needs time and resources. None of us have it. We aren't 20 year-olds. We can only work on one thing, but not be holding a job and do pet-projects of questionable quality on weekends - this is something all of us shared as a collective sentiment. We had had this experience of working two things at a time and it leads to a burn out.
4. We all think it's a tremendously simple idea, because it is, indeed, has no underlying complexity. It isn't a monster and never will be. Yet, this is precisely why we decided that a website may actually become 50% of the work, if not more. The writing and the showing - not a traditional documentation, which you need to update once a new feature or change is being introduced - but a conceptualized specification, a STORY which reads like a good novel. This is what it is an what'll probably become even more of, given time and money.
1. What is your short opinion on and impression of both the website, the idea and the thoughts expressed here?
2. Yes or no question: shall this be pursued further? We want to decide in 3 days. We all have lives and time gets more valuable with every passing minute. We're asking here because this community seemed the most open, non-biased and welcoming. Decisions - only we are responsible for those, but the question posed - would YOU pursue it, given all that I've explained - remains.
3. If the answer to (2) is yes, please share your best non-vague and most specific advice as to how best approach this - to the point of referring us to the people who can donate or invest fast, but if not that - something useful, not something that sounds like "you should try posting there" or "it won't sell itself, you need marketing". If you answered YES to (2), but you do not know the answer to (3) - please say so: we reckon this would be valuable information for us. Not knowing is better than pretending to know.
TO REACH OUT
Privately - use our email posted on the PFC's website (footer section). It's ProtonMail, but here's the PGP-pubkey, in case you need it. Encrypt or not encrypt is up to you. Otherwise, feel free to reply to this post.
P.S.
Out team connected on one more thing, all of us feel very strongly about. We think anything we do can be - and must attempt to - be art. But an art which has utility beyond it's shallow beauty - be it code, software design, idea or a website. There is a deeper game. This project or not, we won't be compromising this ideal ever again.
Thank you all who made it to the end.
We're a very small team of enthusiasts working on a free & open-source tool called
pfc.tools (Pain Free Containers)
There's enough info on the frontpage for anyone on this forum to fully grasp all the details, BUT
please forgive us - it's just the frontpage that's working, and even then - only partially ready. It's all WIP.
We're posting what we have for now because there's not a reason to wait more (see explanations below as to why).
TL;DR
PFC is a simple & unified cli & gui for most popular containers engines, VMs and even cloud provider APIs. It's being written in shell-script and, possibly, Perl. It also has a fully-working predecessor, which, sadly, only works with Docker, but does its job great (see dock.orion3.space).There's enough info on the frontpage for anyone on this forum to fully grasp all the details, BUT
please forgive us - it's just the frontpage that's working, and even then - only partially ready. It's all WIP.
We're posting what we have for now because there's not a reason to wait more (see explanations below as to why).
TL;DR
However, we have 0 (zero) funding. We don't expect to find it here, rather your wise advise would suffice. Everything the project can do, you can read on the frontpage - here, I wanted to share a few more things and ask you a few questions.
FIRST: thoughts & observations all of our collaborators share
1. We first envisioned a crowdfunding campaign, but before that - we needed to build the website. While building it, we decided to waste no time and also did some Twitch streams of the website development; engaged with some people there - all to no avail. There were no contributions, no interest, nothing. Perhaps, wrong platform, but we researched, and there wasn't even any other that would have had developers on it. Even then, most devs don't care, and they always want THEIR THING to be built, not someone else's. Additionally, in this economy, the poor and the middle class do not have any money to spare. In fact, Dock's creator (our predecessor product) told us that after having his submission on Hacker News occupy line #2 of the frontpage for the whole day last spring - it brought in $30 of contributions, from a single individual - and that was about it. Not a cent more ever since.
2. Talking to some more or less wealthy folks, both technical and non-technical, they seemed to be interested in various aspects of this project, but no one seemed to be interested dropping even $5k out of their, say, $10mil we sort of figured they had had. Our goal is actually quite modest: $70k for 6 months with a very detailed plan (yet to be posted). But, those were NOT random folks we spoke to - we were on good terms with them, knew them. Each of our team members had about the same experience: they'd known a person for years, they'd help them when that person needed help, but once asked for help, well, it'd be mostly silence. Even given that some of them understood potential benefits for themselves. We tried both "the donation" and "the commercial" approaches. None worked. Don't think any of us are holding any grudges - it's just that we now know how things work with people, who have money. They aren't being stingy. They aren't hoarding. They aren't spending them on passion projects of their own... they just, sit on it. And that's a fact of life.
3. The reason PFC was conceived was because upon noticing Docker, I decided, I needed the same, but for FreeBSD-jails. And then realizing that it can be done for pretty much anything (and not just BSD-jails or Docker) without introducing much additional complexity formed the final idea. But development is development - It needs time and resources. None of us have it. We aren't 20 year-olds. We can only work on one thing, but not be holding a job and do pet-projects of questionable quality on weekends - this is something all of us shared as a collective sentiment. We had had this experience of working two things at a time and it leads to a burn out.
4. We all think it's a tremendously simple idea, because it is, indeed, has no underlying complexity. It isn't a monster and never will be. Yet, this is precisely why we decided that a website may actually become 50% of the work, if not more. The writing and the showing - not a traditional documentation, which you need to update once a new feature or change is being introduced - but a conceptualized specification, a STORY which reads like a good novel. This is what it is an what'll probably become even more of, given time and money.
SECOND: our questions
1. What is your short opinion on and impression of both the website, the idea and the thoughts expressed here?
2. Yes or no question: shall this be pursued further? We want to decide in 3 days. We all have lives and time gets more valuable with every passing minute. We're asking here because this community seemed the most open, non-biased and welcoming. Decisions - only we are responsible for those, but the question posed - would YOU pursue it, given all that I've explained - remains.
3. If the answer to (2) is yes, please share your best non-vague and most specific advice as to how best approach this - to the point of referring us to the people who can donate or invest fast, but if not that - something useful, not something that sounds like "you should try posting there" or "it won't sell itself, you need marketing". If you answered YES to (2), but you do not know the answer to (3) - please say so: we reckon this would be valuable information for us. Not knowing is better than pretending to know.
TO REACH OUT
Privately - use our email posted on the PFC's website (footer section). It's ProtonMail, but here's the PGP-pubkey, in case you need it. Encrypt or not encrypt is up to you. Otherwise, feel free to reply to this post.
P.S.
Out team connected on one more thing, all of us feel very strongly about. We think anything we do can be - and must attempt to - be art. But an art which has utility beyond it's shallow beauty - be it code, software design, idea or a website. There is a deeper game. This project or not, we won't be compromising this ideal ever again.
Thank you all who made it to the end.