Comments on: Amazon S3 – pay-per-view online file storage

By: Roy

Roy — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:35:18 +0000

Hi Mark. You’re right, nobody ever donates. This is a major issue in the WordPress theme and plugin development world and has been widely discussed. You’re also right that I’m an entrepreneur, but I don’t make a living off of Cumulus or the Flickr widget. Those are hobby projects to me, and I’ve learned a lot by creating and supporting them.

Also, I really believe in Open Source software. It’s nice when people donate, but I’d never create a commercial version of these projects. I’ve actually stopped others from doing so (by enforcing the GPL license) and will continue to make sure these projects remain open.

If at some point someone develops a WordPress App Store that lets you charge small amounts or plugins I’ll consider creating something for that as well. I think that could work, and it could make plugin development more sustainable for developers, probably improving the average quality too.

By: Carl Andrews

Carl Andrews — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:47:34 +0000

Hi Roy,

First of all, thanks for a great article, and a great widget.

I was curious, though: you’ve obviously put a lot of work into this software and you’re even paying hosting fees to serve it up. It seems odd to me that premium widgets (and premium WordPress plugins) are free. I never donate, and I’m pretty sure no one else does either. But I use this software in my own blogs and I’ve made a lot of money as a result.

I think it would fair to charge me something – you just need to make me pay rather than begging for a donation. I’m sure there are open-source devotees who would disagree, but ultimately aren’t they all just cheapskates who want free software?

Anyway, just curious – how do you plan to “monetize” all of that hard work? Are you planning to charge for the widget? You’re an entrepreneur and you don’t seem like a student/slacker who does this stuff for fun. Maybe you make a living by selling ads here on your blog (I sure hope so) – or do you have another approach in mind?

-Mark

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:44:57 +0000

Just wanted to let you know that we fixed the issue in the latest version of CloudBerry Explorer. It will keep ACL on updated files as of version 1.6. Thanks for bringing it up!

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:32:35 +0000

We just got a request for another user for exactly the same thing. We will raise a priority of the issue and try to address it in one of the closest releases.

Thanks.
Andy, CloudBerry Lab

By: Roy

Roy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:41:48 +0000

One thing to note is that both the applications I used will not keep a file’s ACL (access privileges) when overwriting it. So if you’ve set a file up to be available to ‘everyone’, you’ll need to do that again after updating that file. CloudBerry Explorer will give the overwritten file the same ACL settings as the bucket it’s in.

This caused a major oops for me yesterday, because this is clearly different form how FTP works.