The website is a bit misleading since I haven't had the energy to really revamp it to reflect the current state of the project. A lot of the marketing material is still accurate in the details (e.g. features), but the overall presentation makes it look like a product for sale rather than an open source community...
The current state is that it's "just" an open source project, not a business. There are a few people working on it in our spare time. The paid hosting service has shut down.
Oh I see, thanks. I had heard of it before but wasn't familiar enough to know it had previously been paid-for/hosted option.
I actually thought my 'open for business' turn of phrase was going to draw comments like 'its open source what are you talking about', when I only meant that it existed.
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That's a shame it didn't work out, but I think for now the vast majority of people that want 'personal clouds' are so technically minded that they will favour at least running it themselves, if not ensuring that everything is OSS.
Perhaps a critical point can be surpassed after which privacy but not technically minded folks are interested in the by then popular concept, and will pay for the cloud device and then further for apps on its store app.
I think it's a solid idea, but that the money at the moment is in commodity infrastructure or hardware that happens to be used for it, and to a lesser extent software licences .
Did you consider selling Sandstorm licences, as a sort of iOS for a BYO phone, in the analogy?
> Did you consider selling Sandstorm licences, as a sort of iOS for a BYO phone, in the analogy?
We tried for a while. But the kinds of "enterprise" customers who would pay for an on-prem/private-cloud version of Sandstorm are also the kind that don't just wander onto your web site and plug in their credit card... you have to do the enterprise sales dance, which we never had any clue how to do. :/
The current state is that it's "just" an open source project, not a business. There are a few people working on it in our spare time. The paid hosting service has shut down.