ZFS Pro?

Developer discussions about the GUI.

ZFS Pro?

Postby ylluminate » Sun Jun 25, 2017 7:15 am

Has anyone considered a Patreon or some kind of small subscription path that would facilitate a "Pro" GUI for ZFS on macOS (or a web gui generally) that would facilitate various functionality from volume creation to snapshot scheduling, etc? Essentially wrapping everything up into a Disk Utility + Time Machine'esque tool.

I suppose the tool could be made generally so that it would run on every OS that supports ZFS presently in order to gain a wider pool of supporters.
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Re: ZFS Pro?

Postby Brendon » Tue Jul 04, 2017 2:46 pm

What do you suppose this would actually be worth to a user (i.e. how much would they be willing to pay)

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Re: ZFS Pro?

Postby ylluminate » Tue Jul 04, 2017 3:05 pm

Well I'm thinking that a Patreon style method would be more appropriate where perhaps the software itself is has a more nominal price tag, but then a higher level would give "votes" and / or input towards other features. Perhaps even a free version as well that has the source released after X months or such as well. Just brainstorming.

But as far as pricing goes, a subscription of $5-10 might be doable, but more likely if monthly the tolerance will be on the lower end. For a one time cost, perhaps $20-50 depending on just how useful it is. It might even be more if it highly caters to servers and admins very pointedly. Especially if it has some monitoring capabilities and perhaps even submission back to the dev team(s) for analysis of issues, etc. for preemptive work and tuning.

One thing that is always true and we've learned from the iTunes and app stores is that people can tolerate relatively low amounts of monthly drain on their wallet for something useful. I don't know how to reach the "masses" with this, but a $0.99 to $1.99 monthly drain would be more than tolerable if we can find something that would be appealing enough at this price point.

You'd think that with data integrity and core operating system functionality that it would be much more "worth" the cost to people, but for some reason (I've found the hard way) people seem to be more willing to open their wallets to entertainment than actually useful things. Backup itself has finally become a tolerable acceptance after enough marketing and years of beating the data-loss drum, so perhaps that might be a vector... For example, could it be feasible to create, as part of this solution, a ZFS -> Backblaze or Amazon Glacier backup such that snapshots are stored in the cloud via a handy conduit with ZFS Pro?...
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Re: ZFS Pro?

Postby Dismayed » Wed Nov 08, 2017 12:29 pm

I'd pay a subscription just to get support when I need it. I have received help from forum members, which is very generous, but not necessarily scalable.
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Re: ZFS Pro?

Postby lundman » Wed Nov 08, 2017 10:48 pm

I do have a patreon page, should people want do that https://www.patreon.com/lundman but I do feel bad 'asking', it is just who I am I guess. The hard work on ZFS is done by the upstream people after all, although I guess they do have a paid job to do that, whereas this is just my hobby. I also need to find a good way to spread donations among the guys who help with this project, if it ever goes over the $99/y Apple Developer Tax.

I know the upstream guys do paid support as well, but I don't know how it would go down wrt to the OSX port. It would amuse me to find out though :)
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Re: ZFS Pro?

Postby Dismayed » Wed Nov 29, 2017 5:20 am

I'm happy to make a monthly contribution via patreon.
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Re: ZFS Pro?

Postby macz » Fri Feb 23, 2018 12:33 am

I would love to see some of the fishworks crew weigh in and port some of their work from the sun/solaris storage appliance BUI... its slick.. very nice.. and has awsome anylitics..

anyone... anyone...
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