Our main struggle was finding clients to use our hosted version of the software. As we quickly found out, no company wants to have important client information living on a different server. We really didn't like having to create a new branch of our software, then deal with all the licensing involved of it being installed on a remote server we didn't control. In the end, open sourcing was the best option available.

Did you consider going the appliance route? Leasing commodity boxes that can mount network shares via Samba or NFS and reselling them as CPE seems like it would work for this particular software.

That way you would control the software load and be able to manage the quality of the product. And you could use a PPA to manage updates etc.

I'd be really interested to know if you considered this but did not do it and would like to hear the obstacles.

"no company wants to have important client information living on a different server."

Let that be a lesson for the startup people out there.

I work for Bank of America. There's stuff on our servers we don't let other teams in our building have access to.

That's exactly the problem we have at https://commando.io/

No one wants to give us SSH keys to their server. So we have a great product but it's very hard to sell.

"we have a great product but it's very hard to sell" - how can that be true. If it's a great product it would sell.

Obviously nobody in their right mind would hand over their ssh keys to you.

Also the name probably puts some people off. I also don't see any need for what the product does.

"Never type the same commands into multiple terminal windows again!" - I can easily do that already with ssh (or clusterSSH) - I don't want a UI for server commands, I want to script this stuff. When you analyze a little deeper, I think you'll see why the product isn't selling. I hope you are able to make a go of it, but my gut instinct tells me that dashboards and apps like yours are too hard to make into anything substantial.

Well Commando.IO has a hosted version. But I don't believe that rakes Command.IO in much money. If people had more trust, Commando.IO would be covered in cash. It's a great product!

I like how your response to criticism is to ignore it, and say how great your product is in the third person.

Wow. Seem like a great product. Maybe you could license it to cloud hosters? I'd love Linode to have an interface like this.

(off topic) your logo looks very similar to the crunchbang linux logo: http://crunchbang.org/

Founder of Commando.io here. First, I'm not exactly sure who you are, but your not officially associated with Commmando.io. Second, we generate SSH keys, and users then add our generate pub key into their servers authorized_keys. Users can revoke the commando.io pub key at any time from authorized_keys.