At the very least, you should offer a hosted version of this (borrowing the wordpress.com/wordpress.org model would seem the best plan) so that non-technical churches could click a button and just have it magically spin up a website and start billing their card every month.
Seems a bit silly looking in from the outside that you'd spend seven years building something that's clearly worth selling, then refuse to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few "church.io hosting" businesses spring up within a week if you don't build that option yourself.
I like this honesty. Do what you love. If you love writing code and not dealing with business and selling stuff then write code and don't go into business.
It's lovely to see someone make something beautiful and useful for the sake of his own love and passion. We may not share the same love or passion but I admire your spirit.
Why not just look for a partner? I'm sure you'd have plenty of takers. This thing is ready to start billing tomorrow by the looks of it. Then you would have more freedom to pursue your passions, while someone else deals with the customers for a percentage or whatever.
True... it's even set up to run multiple "sites" off the same instance of the app and database. But I have a day job I love and don't need this to be a commercial thing.
You could at least sign up for gittip or throw a btc/ltc/dodge address up there. I'm sure users who donate will feel just as good as you do when you donate your services. Either way, the app looks great. Keep up the good work.
I've read your other comments on this thread and I've got to tell you that I love your attitude and find you very inspirational! Thanks for showing off this app, it looks great...
I would give it away for free, and sell it. My process would be pretty simple. I would go to Guidestar and download the financials for the last three years(click free
preview). If the church is legit, and not a moneymaker for
a few select people they would get the software for free.
> Her smile tilted. “Mark, you don’t pay back your parents. You can’t. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It’s a sort of entailment. Or if you don’t have children of the body, it’s left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.”
- from "A Civil Campagaign"(The Vorkosigan Saga Series) by Lois Bujold
I realize you may have been joking, but I wonder how most atheists and other nonreligious people here would feel about selling a product or service targeted specifically at religious people or churches. To me, it feels dirty, like I would be saying, "I know that religions are false and even harmful, but I'm going to milk those less enlightened believers for all they're worth."
What difference would it make? Religious institutions, writers, horse-traders, scuba divers - a market is a market.
If you go into any business harboring that level of disrespect for your customers then you're probably going to fail to provide a product they'll be willing to use. Although there is also an argument to be made for domain experience - if you're going to sell a service to religious groups wouldn't you be more likely to understand the market without having a bias against religion?
There is actually something to be said for not being personally/emotionally invested in the market you're in, it can help you to see things more objectively.
On the other hand, if you're emotionally invested in atheism, in the sense that you actively want to see religion gone (as opposed to just not believing as a personal choice), you're emotionally invested in religion by extension.
I've never heard "emotionally invested in atheism" mean "you actively want to see religion gone". In fact, I find that idea quite disrespectful. That's just as bad as a religious person trying to push their religious ideals onto you.
I know a large number of religious people who would consider themselves "emotionally invested in their religion" but I would never describe any of them as "actively wanting to see all other beliefs gone".
"New Atheism is a social and political movement in favour of atheism and secularism promoted by a collection of modern atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.""
This is actually startlingly true - it would make a lot of sense for someone to steal OP's idea and capitalize on it. I hope, however, that no one does. It's a great thing he's done.
Yeah, capitalizing on such an effort might spoil the fun but...
The code has been licensed under an Affero GPL v3 license so anybody using it in production must release any modifications done. So it's not really stealing the idea or the code, only the business model, which the OP apparently doesn't want to pursue anyway.
A non Affero license (or MIT, BSD, Apache) would have shut him off from his code (I can't decide if those using those licenses are masochists or just extremely kind). With this choice of the license the OP will get fixes and improvements and probably be happy with that. Furthermore he could be hired to do them, regardless of the license.
As an atheist, I would feel great about taking money, house keys, login passwords and encryption keys from religious people, to take care of their pets, servers, possessions and left behind loved ones after the rapture. http://www.aftertherapturepetcare.com/http://eternal-earthbound-pets.com/
Then what exactly is your definition of religious? Does it somehow exclude the hundreds of millions of Christians who believe in the rapture (41% of all Americans, 52% of Americans in the South)? If so, then that's some creative gerrymandering and I'd love to see your rationalization and sources!
In the South, a full 52 percent of those polled predicted that JC's return is imminent. Those figures come from a June 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center for People & the Press.
Think Only a Few Fools Believe in the Rapture? Think Again.
In other words, a substantial portion of the American public—more than 4 out of 10—disagrees with the May 21 Rapture freaks only with respect to the date and some of the details of Jesus’ return. Think of that stat the next time you’re assured by some liberal theologian that the arguments of contemporary atheists are directed against targets that no longer exist.
I remember media reporting a survey of children which "discovered" that a full 1/4 of children under the age of 12 had been involved with committing armed robbery in the UK.
There were some methodological flaws including asking children in groups what were their experiences of crime.
Turns out kids like to maintain social standing with over kids through exaggeration.
Who knew.
Yes there are morons out there who think God is personally going to save them first as they will be closest to the altar. But most of my problem with religion is not religion - it's lying and power grabbing and manipulation and deceit and murder and social entrapment and the inertia of crowds.
Religion corrals this behaviour but it's humans not religion that does it. If you want to convert others beware of your own motivations. They won't be different to those of religion. Because you aren't different. And that's my point.
I guess it is the difference between selling a bad product with the intent of exploiting people and just selling a good product to a market one has little affinity with.
As an atheist I do not feel contempt or superiority with anyone religious - indeed most religious people I know I respect greatly for their integrity and community minded committment. (Most religious people whom I disrespect I would disrespect if they were atheists too - it is I guess "by their actions you will know them")
Put it a different way - this project looks like an excellent product / saas to sell to the Mosque and Synagogue market as well as Protestant Church market. I expect there are some hard coded assumptions that would need pulling out to a config file, but just as I see common behaviour between religions as decent, honest, community minded and "good" I think the common needs of decent honest community minded organisations seem to be met by this product.
As an atheist I would have no qualms selling this to different markets. I suspect however that the story behind this (7 years, Christian coder) is too good for one market and a disability in the others. Would be interesting to know.
Anyway, good luck and I still suggest partnering with a hustler to build a non-profit org to sell saas on the back of this
"To me, it feels dirty, like I would be saying." It would be quite a few orders of magnitude less immoral than how immoral some of us Athiests consider the institution of church and how they "use" their followers. (For info, look at some of the big church networks and churches)
But I have no moral qualms with it as long as no one is being scammed. If people knowingly want to part with their money, and you're not mis-representing things in order to convince them of it, then no amount of "moral" arguments will make what you're doing dirty or immoral. It's not up to you to make moral judgements about how other people wish to spend/throwaway their money.
Good for you man. But just realize that sadly, many churches operate as businesses where the pastor and his family just pocket tithes for their lifestyle and build fancy LED signs instead of giving to the poor......
I know a lot of pastors, and none of them have lifestyles that stand out in their communities.
The inner city churches I know all have food banks, clothing banks, free hot meals, or similar programs. The churches I know in Utah set up safe houses for women and children fleeing polygamy.
If you're connected to a church that operates as a business with the pastor taking home the profits, time to find a different church.
I believe the current pope has gone on record saying that the Christian world pays more attention to sexual issues than is warranted, when compared to other issues that exist in the world. I'm not a Catholic, but am quite impressed with this guy so far.
You're awfully easy to impress, if only by the slight contrast to how absolutely evil, horrible and immoral the previous pope was.
Not even the current "liberal hippie pope" is having much success changing the Catholic Church from within, so what makes you think anyone who's not its most powerful leader could ever possibly have any success? Anyone claiming they haven't resigned from the Catholic Church in disgrace because they want to remain inside to be an "agent of change" is totally full of it, and guilty of perpetuating the problem.
Does it actually impress you that the current pope wasn't personally the architect and prosecutor of officially covering up and perpetuating all the terrible widespread sexual abuse systematically perpetrated by the Catholic Church, who wrote and enforced the official church policy of protecting priests who rape children, and excommunicating anyone who speaks out about it? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/17/religion.childp...http://thewe.cc/weplanet/news/europe/vatican/papal_evil.htm
If the pope's desire to cover up sexual abuse is what you mean by "paying more attention to sexual issues than is warranted", can you please justify why you think the Catholic Church should pay less attention to their longstanding issues of raping children and protecting the rapists from prosecution? And why you think it's a good thing that the current pope doesn't think it's such a big deal that requires much attention?
I see you're relatively new to Hacker News and may not have had time to fully grasp our culture. While I value the experience of those who remember usenet newsgroups, this is not usenet and we do not appreciate the same sort of posts as might have been popular there.
I think this is a common misconception. While I am sure there are outliers as with any normalized distribution, the mean salary for clergy is about $45k/yr (according to the US BLS).
In the past decade churches have moved towards explicitly having their books run by non-members. It takes away the temptation of members abusing funds, and makes the people in charge apply the normal amount of oversight on bookkeeping, instead of "he's one of us, he'd never steal."
PS I love the word bookkeeping and would love it even more if the "p" were doubled.
In truth this seems to be the US mega-churches. Round here the pastors live a decent but modest life. Enough to raise a family not enough to buy a flashy car.
Not that long ago, you participated in an HN poll that showed about 3/4 of the HN population do not believe in God. Yet this particular comment, and several of yours in this post, have been downmodded heavily. That suggests either that the religious types on HN are very well organized, or that even the non-religious types find these comments out of place. I suggest it is the latter.
You complained a few months ago about someone being rude, and said "Religious discrimination is no lesser than racism or sexism." Perhaps you should take your own advice to heart. Somebody here showed a project he's been working on which happens to be religious-focused. The right response is to discuss his software -- not to make discriminatory comments about religion. Notice that nobody has engaged in religious proselytizing in this thread except for you (in deleted comments). Nobody has tried to wedge in any sort of commentary about the truth of Christianity or any other religion except for you. Everybody else knows better.
Here on HN, we prefer for comments to have actual substance -- to say genuinely interesting things. There's a section of the guidelines that's explicit about flamewar topics (religion, politics): only introduce those topics if you have something genuinely new to say. The parent comment, as well as most of yours, are stale and boring. There's nothing genuinely new, nothing profound, nothing insightful, just anger. That may be appropriate for FaceBook, but not for Hacker News. Elevate the conversation.
While I don't think he needs to sell it, the hosted option is definitely something to look into. I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option and thought "Oh cool, they'll provision a DO droplet and install this for you!" Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves.
That said, it's open source - so anyone (including me!) is free to set this up.
> I saw the "Install in the Cloud" option
> ...
> Unfortunately any church that wants to use this is going to need
> someone technical enough to handle the installation themselves.
I thought it would be awesome if that button would actually (eventually) result in setting up a droplet and installing the software for me. I think sandstorm[0] is going into that direction.
I guess one tricky part of such infrastructure would be maintenance. Optimally, a user could spin up a "church.io"-drop (or e.g. "smtp/imap stack + $antispam + mailpile"-drop) and never have to care about any updates. providers can offer subscriptions for regular (curated) updates of each "drop".
With such infrastructure in place, the curch-community could click said button, follow through some dialogs, enter a CC and 5 minutes later have their own instance + domain. timmorgan gets paid per install by the infrastructure provider (who profits on the long run through subscription-fees).
I think the concepts of unikernels and clive[1] fit well into this picture, by exposing a more concise resource/environment API to the developer and easing deployment (which would be a nice thing, even without the picture painted above).
I strongly considered building on DigitalOcean API and doing some sort of pre-built image where I transfer it to the customer or something. I'm interested in Sandstorm -- will check it out!
Hey Tim, love your work on this. I started something called The Sunday Assembly - which is church for the not religious (though plenty of religious folk come too) - and we are in the process of building software which is so similar.
I also looked through the current offerings and thought the market was just not well served. It seems like a huge mistake on someone's part.
Do you have anyone using the software yet? I would be interested in finding out if we could. Super great work!
> Seems a bit silly looking in from the outside that you'd spend seven years building something that's clearly worth selling, then refuse to sell it.
Building something that fits your needs and releasing it to others as open source rather than setting up a business to sell it is, if "silly", a common form of silliness without which there wouldn't be much open source software at all.
> Vatican City the 18th wealthiest nation in the world per capita.
Per capita stats for the State of Vatican City really don't tell much even about the wealth of the Catholic Church as a church. Its kind of live judging the wealth of the United States by dividing the assets of the federal treasury by the number of people who live in the White House and the US Naval Observatory.
The Vatican in no way represents the average. They're about as far an outlier as you're gonna find. The parent comment mentioned specifically small churches with low budget/tech-phobia as well.
It it bowing at the altar of Mammon to have a career? (An honest question, as I'm not sure what your or Tim's take on that is.) I believe that there's room for being able to make a comfortable income out of something like this, without making the money the priority.
Tim could choose look at it not as "I'm getting rich!", and instead as "This is a way for me to sustainably build something I love and ensure that my users can get reliable updates, because I can do this for my career instead of working at {CompanyX}."
One could likely even charter it as a business where outside a regular salary, the remainder of any profits get donated back (or costs reduced).
It's __certainly__ more trouble than giving it away for free, as you'd need an accountant and worry about taxes. On the other hand, if this is a service that you feel every church deserves good access to if they want it, being able to work full-time on it might make it happen more easily.
As for the churches, I'm sure that many of them pay for services that they feel are worth it. Landscaping, maintenance, etc, are not always something that every church can do in-house, and this service sounds like it falls into the bin of "things people would pay for".
As well he could take the "expand my territory" bent implying that the more funds applied, the more churches could have this, the more churches that have this the better the 'kingdom of God' or whathaveyou
At the very least, you should offer a hosted version of this (borrowing the wordpress.com/wordpress.org model would seem the best plan) so that non-technical churches could click a button and just have it magically spin up a website and start billing their card every month.
Seems a bit silly looking in from the outside that you'd spend seven years building something that's clearly worth selling, then refuse to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few "church.io hosting" businesses spring up within a week if you don't build that option yourself.