Congratulations to the graph.cool team! I've been following them for a couple of months now and I am very impressed by the passion and the progress that they put in. Some really cool stuff cooking in the GraphQL community.
Trello + Pomello is a quite powerful combo. Not only I use it for focusing, but also tracking time that I spend on freelancing (down to specific Trello tickets).
Completely agree that open sourcing the software can be very good for the business (I'm a little biased though).
Think of OSS as an entry into the market - you get exposure, feedback and community (if you actively invest into building it). If your software creates value for enterprises, they will pay you anyway because they need commercial support and some sort of warranty and reliability.
Check out https://www.minohubs.com/ (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder). We help open source developers to monetize and fund their projects.
I'm assuming that filesprout doesn't do anything about EU VAT because I couldn't find any information on their site.
What does it actually mean then? They're likely to be responsible for EU VAT anyway. Do they provide me with EU VAT invoice that states supplier's VAT number? If not, then it can't act as an intermediary, and that makes them responsible for EU VAT, even if they're based in the US.
Can I comply with EU VAT myself selling through it? Very unlikely. For each B2C transaction EU requires me to have 2 pieces of non-contradictory evidence of customer's location. I will likely need buyer's IP, billing address, card country and in some cases even additional verification if all other pieces evidence contradict (actually happened to me when I was travelling). It doesn't seem that filesprout handles all of that and can provide me with that information.
Yes, it is definitely realistic. We've seen several projects like Sidekiq (http://sidekiq.org/) that did it.
Another quantitative indicator you can use is number of downloads on relevant package manager (npm, PyPi etc.). These indicators only tell you how big your audience is and not whether your project could provide income. However, having big audience increase chances of success - you have a good position here.
Check out MinoHubs (https://www.minohubs.com). We provide tools that will help you get started with monetizing your project in several ways very quickly. Let us know if you have any questions or if you're missing anything.
We host discussion boards for free as well. Additionally, posts created by backers have their scores boosted and they visually stand out. Project owners and the community will recognise that a particular question is posted by a person who has a stake in the project, which might give the backer faster reply or assistance.
There's at least one open source project[1] out there, something I think Red Hat may actually be involved with (or behind) for managing subscriptions and what-not. We haven't deployed it yet, as we aren't yet at the point of having paying customers. And if we signed a deal tomorrow we'd just keep track of things manually in the interim.
As for distribution... we're working on our own homegrown "customer portal" which will deal with downloads and what-not, as well as other "customer stuff".
When attaching my servers, the script executed fine. However, none of my servers are recognised. The list shows (2/1), but displays no names (2 empty strings that I can choose from). Couldn't get anything working. Anything I am doing wrong?
P.S. couldn't send any message through neither Intercom nor support button at the top.
I got the same problem (login: bernat). Running on plain Ubuntu 14.04. I have also tried to unlink the agent to relink them, but "Link new" button gives the landing page where we choose the free/non-free version. So now, I don't have any server instance...
Also, I didn't log with GitHub because I didn't want to give write access to anything. You should give the option to only request the email address.
