What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

What patio11 doesn't get, is that part of the reason why HN crowd considers tarsnap "the best backup software" is exactly because Colin Percival is what patio11 calls "bad at business" (and what I would call "motivated not only by money").

BTW, that is the same reason for the backlash over Oculus acquisition: people are upset that it will no longer be run by "bad at business" engineers like John Carmack, but instead by "very good at business" Mark Zuckerberg.

The presumption here is palpable. There do exist factors other than the financial -- whole categories of them -- that people take into account when making value judgments like this.

Maybe some people view the Oculus acquisition through that myopic lens, but many do not, and your generalizations do your point of view no justice while simultaneously misrepresenting many of theirs.

Exactly. What patio11 calls "Geek to Geek" business and suggests Colin move away from. Any new user who sees the suggested standard three tier pricing scheme is going to immediately recognize a traditional business. And there goes the entire g2g market. Which I suppose patio11 doesn't care about given that he's suggesting a move away from that.

But without g2g, Colin is going to be competing in a huge market with a bunch of other players. He's also likely to enjoy his business a whole lot less.

Oculus was never run by anyone who is bad at business.

John Carmack came on relatively late as CTO, not CEO, and Palmer was the owner of some valuable IP, not the one running the business.

HN is wrong about why Tarsnap is the best backup software, and that's partly because Colin is falsely modest about what Tarsnap is. Tarsnap is the best backup software because it is the most technically credible secure backup service on the Internet.

One way you can gauge just how wrong HN is about this point is to compare Tarsnap's business to that of any well-known backup provider, virtually all of which could (presuming, perhaps unfairly, that Colin is rational) buy Tarsnap with pocket change.

Backup is a huge business, and enterprise/business backup is an especially lucrative segment of that business. Colin has the most technically credible offering for that segment. But he captures only a tiny fraction of it, and regularly finds himself on HN explaining to HN people why Tarsnap costs so much given how cheap AWS storage is. Q.E.D.

It’s kind of amazing that some people here believe its modest price to be Tarsnap’s main value proposition.

This sort of misunderstanding is encouraged by using one's limited supply of the customer's time and attention to highlight "picodollars" as opposed to "Considering online backups? You get to choose between a) you can retrieve your backups, b) other people can't retrieve your backups, c) a and b, but only if you won the Putnam."

In the 90's Microsoft could (presuming, perhaps unfairly, that Linus is/was rational) have bought Linux kernel for pocket change.

The community values when money/power is not the only/main driver for people creating technology. And for a good reason, I think. When we ask ourselves "why we can't have nice things", more often than not the answer is that "people in charge" are motivated by making more money, not making better stuff.

Yes, there is some naivete in this mindset. But I think some of that innocence is a good thing. FWIW, I liked patio11 more when he was excitingly writing how he earned $30k on Bingo cards then the new incarnation that is proud of using a shitty ThemeForest template because A/B tests well.

No, they could not have, because the Linux kernel is open source software. But I understand the confusion, because Colin does his level best to market Tarsnap as if that was what it was.

I am unclear on what you think the purpose of a commercial website is, given your objection to the idea of suggestions that make them perform better.

I don't really have any objections, or really any opinion on whether Colin should or should not charge more.

I was just pointing out that it is a good thing that there are smart people who are "bad at business", who are "irrational" as you put it. Many good things we have came from such irrational people (that was the point about Linux parallel) and many ugly things come from people who are only following the bottom line.

Right, because geeks never buy services from traditional businesses.

Oh, wait.

>>Colin is going to be competing in a huge market with a bunch of other players. He's also likely to enjoy his business a whole lot less.

Also painfully incorrect. When you have a unique selling proposition, it's easy to compete in a huge market with a bunch of other players. It's also enjoyable.

How "painfully" self-centered. It's not about whether you consider it to be enjoyable or easy. It's about what Colin is likely to experience. And given his past reluctance to listen to similar Tarsnap related business advice thrown his way numerous times over the years, one conclusion we can draw is that he fully understands what the options are and he simply doesn't believe he would enjoy the change. There are other possibilities for his lack of change, but I didn't hear you suggest any.

Well, I would not assume to guess what Colin would enjoy, or how he would enjoy it.

However I agree, it does depend on Colin's motivations. If Colin doesn't want more users, and doesn't want more money (for even the same amount of work), then your viewpoint is possibly accurate and has merit.

Other possibilities for his lack of change are clear - we do not always act in our best interests for a garden variety of reasons(negative mindsets, backgrounds, etc etc). This can be very frustrating to our friends, who might have experience and insight into our situation, and want the best for us.