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(Paid) Hosting

Added by Jan Schulz-Hofen almost 15 years ago

Dear Redmine community,

first of all I would like to congratulate you on a great piece of software and say thank you very much for all your hard work that has been put into it. I started using Redmine in fall 2007 and soon converted all my projects to use it. It's been a great pleasure using it and seeing it evolve since then. I've also installed Redmine for a number of clients (we are a software consultancy firm), some of which aren't even working on software related projects. I've found Redmine to work great for engineers, architects, writers, and so on.

Ever since I installed Redmine for one of our clients I had the idea of creating a "hosted Redmine" service. Right now I'm managing a number of different Redmine instances for them and it takes some time to keep them all up to date as you can imagine. So the idea would be to adapt Redmine to allow for different "tenants", i.e. administrators who manage their own sets of projects, users, workflows, etc.

Now that being said, I would like to discuss a few points with people who are interested.

  1. Ethics and Conduct
    Legally (and afaik, please correct me if I'm wrong), you can just take GPL software, host it on your own server and make money with it. In fact, I've already earned money by installing Redmine for my clients. That's the great thing about GPL. But I think that there's more involved than just a legal document. If I was starting a Redmine Hosting business, I would want to make sure that everyone involved is happy with it. After all, it's your work which I would base my business upon. So the main question here would be: How would this be done right? How can you use Redmine, make money with it and still be liked by the ones who've built it? Is it by donating code, bug reports, money?
  2. Related work
    I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first or only one to have this idea. However, I haven't found anything related to this by doing a search on redmine.org. Neither did I find a great deal of hits using Google. There are a couple of companies who (I'd suspect) are doing what I'm doing right now: installing Redmine over and over again for clients. But I haven't found anyone who has built or runs a multi-tenant Redmine. Are you aware of similar projects?
  3. Relation to Github
    I see that a great deal of people (especially in the Ruby/Rails community) have moved from SVN to Git and from whatever they used for SCM hosting and project management to Github. I love Github and I think those guys had a brilliant idea at the right time and are executing it very well. A hosted Redmine would be in direct competition with Github with all its implications. What do you guys think about it? How could Redmine differenciate itself from Github? For which reasons would users choose hosted Redmine over Github? Why do you use Redmine and not Github? Is it only because you can install and manage Redmine on your own?

I would be glad if this spawned a little discussion. Looking forward to your comments.

Thanks,

Jan


Replies (6)

RE: (Paid) Hosting - Added by Lars P. almost 15 years ago

Hi Jan

http://svnrepository.com/

Is doing exactly that, so you can combine SVN or GIT with Redmine and have it hosted at their place.
We are kinda tired of maintaining this ourselves as now, so we will probably go for this.

RE: (Paid) Hosting - Added by Eric Davis almost 15 years ago

Jan Schulz-Hofen wrote:

first of all I would like to congratulate you on a great piece of software and say thank you very much for all your hard work that has been put into it. I started using Redmine in fall 2007 and soon converted all my projects to use it. It's been a great pleasure using it and seeing it evolve since then. I've also installed Redmine for a number of clients (we are a software consultancy firm), some of which aren't even working on software related projects. I've found Redmine to work great for engineers, architects, writers, and so on.

That's great. We should share some notes on how they are using Redmine, I'm seeing more and more businesses using Redmine outside of the software domain.

  1. Ethics and Conduct
    Legally (and afaik, please correct me if I'm wrong), you can just take GPL software, host it on your own server and make money with it. In fact, I've already earned money by installing Redmine for my clients.

That is true because you are not charging money for Redmine, but the services you bundle with it (e.g. setup, hosting).

How can you use Redmine, make money with it and still be liked by the ones who've built it? Is it by donating code, bug reports, money?

It's a fine line but it's doable (I base my business on custom Redmine development). The best thing to do is to support the Redmine community however you can. This can be patches you've developed for customers (code), bugs you've found, money to cover the project's expenses, or your time for things like support.

  1. Related work
    I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first or only one to have this idea. However, I haven't found anything related to this by doing a search on redmine.org. Neither did I find a great deal of hits using Google. There are a couple of companies who (I'd suspect) are doing what I'm doing right now: installing Redmine over and over again for clients. But I haven't found anyone who has built or runs a multi-tenant Redmine. Are you aware of similar projects?

SourceRepo.com is also offering hosted Redmine as part of the their plans. I did a bit of work for them and recommend them for smaller teams. Blog post about them.

  1. Relation to Github
    I see that a great deal of people (especially in the Ruby/Rails community) have moved from SVN to Git and from whatever they used for SCM hosting and project management to Github. I love Github and I think those guys had a brilliant idea at the right time and are executing it very well. A hosted Redmine would be in direct competition with Github with all its implications. What do you guys think about it? How could Redmine differenciate itself from Github? For which reasons would users choose hosted Redmine over Github? Why do you use Redmine and not Github? Is it only because you can install and manage Redmine on your own?

I'm a big fan of GitHub but I think they are more focused on the code hosting side and community side. Whereas Redmine is more focused on communication and tasks. One big difference is, with Redmine you get to keep all of your data wherever you want. With GitHib, where are your Issues stored? Your file uploads? What would happen if GitHub left or they turned off issue tracking for everyone?

Eric Davis

RE: (Paid) Hosting - Added by TaskPoint Project over 14 years ago

Jan,
we did kind of what you are tlking about at PMP HQ http://www.pmphq.com. We do have Redmine based online project management solution which does autoprovisioning billing etc. We are working now on automatic add on provisioning to provide additional services to our customers. As of git and github we are trying to be source control agnistic and provide our customers ability to choose system they like.

RE: (Paid) Hosting - Added by Jan from Planio www.plan.io over 14 years ago

Hey PMP HQ, that's very interesting. Would you care to share some of your experience with this? We will focus on the German market, so we won't be competitors, I guess... My Email is jan (at) rocket-rentals (dot) de

RE: (Paid) Hosting - Added by Jan from Planio www.plan.io about 14 years ago

Just a short update on our Redmine Hosting 'Planio': We're now live! Check us out, if you like. Planio has integrated SVN&Git repositories, plus a growing list of extras like start/stop time tracking, improved email dropbox functionality, automated issue creation on exceptions, etc. It's easy to set up and you're ready to go in <5 minutes. It's also free for the first 30 days.

I would appreciate your feedback on this. (Disclosure: I work for Planio)

RE: (Paid) Hosting - Added by Megan Bennett about 14 years ago

I spammed the forum and got my post edited.

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