The BeOSJournal recently requested from the BeOS Community to post questions for the guys behind BeBits.com. And post they did. Here is what Sean Heber and Greg Nichols provided to the questions from the forum, and my own additional questions.

Welcome guys, it's been a while since the last time we got together for an interview. We hope the New Year was kind to you, perhaps you got some nice Christmas presents?


Heber:
I think one of the coolest things I got for Christmas was a digital clock that sets itself using a signal transmitted via short-wave radio. That nicely replaced the old clock I used to have in my living room which would randomly stop running for a few days and then just as randomly start back up again. Naturally it was usually 10 or 11 hours off at any given time. :-)

Nichols:
A DVD or two, some books, a few pairs of pants. I was actually pretty excited about the pants. :-) Most of all it was great being with my whole family, which is getting harder and harder to pull off these days.


TBJ : I guess we don't need to describe who you are too much, but for those that are new, can you give us the highlights anyway? :)

Heber:
I'm Sean. I did most of the coding and database work behind BeBits including setting up and maintaining the server. I'm 24 and live by myself in a small town in Iowa. I graduated from college with a Computer Science degree in 2002.

Nichols:
Ummm... I'm Greg, I just turned 24, I live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (for the moment anyway). I did nearly all the design and graphics work on BeBits, and here and there, a tiny bit of the coding. I'm officially the president of Fifth Ace Productions, the company that "owns" BeBits - we thought it would be cool to have a company, plus it helps to separate taxes and stuff. (Not that being president means anything in this case... as I recall, we flipped for it.) I answer a lot of the e-mail (the e-mail that makes it through the spam-filters anyway; I get anywhere from 500-1000 spams a day now). I'm into Christianity, guitar (I play badly), tae kwon do (even more badly... I just started, so I wear my white belt with pride!), and movies (especially random movie trivia).


TBJ : How busy are you guys in your own work and life, other than dealing with BeBits?

Heber:
Heh, well, right now I'm unemployed so the work life is pretty much nonexistent. Anyone have a job for me out there? One I could do from home, maybe? One that pays money? :-) Other than that, I've been pretty busy spending lots of time with my girlfriend while she's home for Christmas break and working on some side projects of mine and doing odd jobs to try to make enough money to pay the rent.

Nichols:
Quite busy actually. I also had a nice, cushy programming job, but thanks to the economy and various bits of evilness from certain people, I lost my job too. I am now working almost full-time at a small school for behaviorally-challenged high school students. A great job, lots of fun, but it barely pay the bills and I'm probably going to have to pick up another job for a few months. On top of that I'm applying to graduate school in computer science for next fall, and those applications are due in just a few days. It's all kind of nutty right now.


jeanmarc : With the shameful BeOS split, we have now various BeOS "distros" like PhOS, Zeta (maybay even more in the futur), how Bebits plan to manage apps for them?

Heber:
Currently the plan is just to add new BeOS versions to our database for these things as they are needed. I don't think that is a good long-term solution, though. We've been thinking about ways to change things around so that the various versions would be better taken care of it. It is mostly a matter of finding the time and means to get together and hammer out the details.

Nichols:
Yes yes. We're working on it. It's becoming more and more necessary.


TBJ : Have there been plans to expand the options for Developers looking to publish their wares?

Heber:
There's always plans... it is just a question of which plans get executed. :-)

Nichols:
True. There's always stuff going on behind the scenes. We have LOTS of ideas. Some of them get played around with. Most of that stuff ends up sucking and never makes it onto the site itself, but stuff happens nonetheless. Which doesn't really answer the question, but... ummm... OK then.

Jonathan Thompson : Will BeBits ever go back to being a store where you can order and buy software via the site? And if so, when?

Heber:
I'd like to, however some key things will have to be worked out before we try that again. We had an insanely high rate of credit card fraud and charge-backs. This cost us a lot of money and since we didn't know how bad it could be beforehand, we hadn't really planned for it. We pretty much ended up paying the developers for each sale they made, even though in many cases we lost the money to those sales due to fraud a month or two after we had mailed the checks to the devs.

Nichols:
Ah, yes... chargebacks. A chargeback, for those of you who don't know, is the fine ($20 for us) that a merchant gets charged everytime someone claims that a transaction was a fraud. The credit card fraud laws are great for the consumer... if someone steals your credit card number and buys something, chances are pretty good that you'll get your money back. Which is great for consumers, but stacks the deck pretty heavily against sites like BeBits.

So if someone... anyone... claimed fraud, we had no way to prove that it wasn't fraud and just like that, we lost the money for the sale, plus the $20 chargeback fee, and as Sean said, the timing usually worked out badly in terms of when the checks got sent out too. That ate all our profits pretty fast until we couldn't afford to run the store anymore. That was a loss for everybody! We liked the store.

Users liked the store. Developers LOVED the store... they sold more than they ever did with BeDepot and made more on each sale. Even though we didn't make that much on it ourselves, I'd be up for bringing it back if we could figure out a way around the fraud aspect. We've tossed some ideas around but honestly, it's not high on the list at the moment.


TBJ : How successful was running the BeBits Store, and does that have anything to do with the Tip Jar?

Heber:
The store was successful in that there were quite a few sales and it provided some income to a few BeOS developers. It wasn't so successful for us, though, due to the heavy amount of work involved in mailing out checks to the devs, dealing with the charge-backs, and the minimal amount of money we actually took in as profit. It helped, though. In the end we did make some money from the store and most of that money is still in our checking account for paying bandwidth charges and replacing hardware.

The Tip Jar isn't really connected with the store at all. Amazingly, our banner ad still seems to pay a decent chunk of the hosting fees for the server. We use the old store profits and new tip jar income to fill in the gaps during months where we don't make enough from the ads to pay the bills.

Nichols:
It's worth pointing out that for some developers, the store did very well indeed. There were a few bits of software that sold several hundred copies or more, which might not sound like a lot, but is pretty darned good for shareware on an operating system like BeOS. One developer had a nice application that got good reviews on a few of the news sites, and ended up taking home almost $5,000! (He was *thrilled* by this!)

Other bits, as you'd expect, didn't do so well, but for the most part everyone was happy. The store as a whole didn't quite make $50,000 overall but was in the neighborhood. As for the Tip Jar... if you've donated, thank you! I try to send out notes to everybody who does, but I've fallen waaaaay behind with that.


smashIt : How much GBs do you currently need for BeBits and what are the costs to run the site?

Heber:
See Greg's answer. :-)

Nichols:
The web part of the site usually generates about 50 GB of traffic monthly (that's just HTML and graphics). There's also a few GB of traffic that comes from our FTP archives and other miscellaneous things. In terms of hosting costs... it's good to have a friend who owns an ISP! We get a substantial price chop but it still costs a few hundred dollars monthly. Most times the ad revenue still covers that, sometimes with a bit to spare. Sometimes it doesn't, and that's when Tip Jar revenue is good to have.

Still, we may have to consider other options at some point... more ads, most likely. Not a fun thing but the bill must be paid. If you want to help out, then either send money or if you're cheap, wait until a paying ad comes up (aka not a public service ad) and then click it a few times. They keep track of this stuff, and it helps us out.


TBJ : Have you considered tying BeBits into a peer-to-peer application such as Gnutella, DirectConnect, etc?

Heber:
Interesting idea. I hadn't really thought about that.

Nichols:
Huh... that'd be kind of cool... we'd have to find a way of doing it that didn't suck a lot of bandwidth and still tied into BeBits in a substantial way, and didn't cost us a lot. As an aside: I really don't like being focused on money all the time, but sadly, those are the realities of running a site like this. You just can't afford to do it out-of-pocket (unless you have more money than we do, I guess), and just about every site out there deals with the same issue in one way or another.

We're lucky that basic banner ad revenue has largely been good enough for so long, without having to resort to subscriptions or some such thing. As long as the site can pay for itself, we can attempt to do stuff like this, which would be fun, I think. But Sean and I haven't personally made anything off of BeBits for a long time (early 2000 if I recall).


Guest: There are several listings that are obsolete, outdated or have broken links. Any chance of a cleanup?

Heber:
This sort of ties in with the next question. There is a way for people to report bad links right now, but it doesn't really affect the app listing at all. On the application's page each download link also has a "Report Bad Link" button which you can press if you find the link doesn't work correctly. You can also add an additional location if you know of one right from there by clicking on the "Add Additional Location" link just under the download links.

Nichols:
One thing that we were thinking of that may happen at some point is to move applications that are old, not maintained, and have broken links into a "graveyard". They'll still be accessible if you want to browse through a lot of old stuff but won't be there cluttering up the main pages.


TBJ : What about volunteers from the community to help moderate the listings?

Heber:
We've thought about this a lot. In fact, just a few days before this interview request came through Greg and I had started talking about it again. This would be a major benefit to BeBits and the community as a whole, I think. As everyone is aware, there's a lot of dead links and illegal links that keep popping up and it takes a lot of time and attention to deal with them. It'd be better if that load was distributed.

We've also been toying with the idea of building a system so that people could provide translations of app entries in other languages (especially Japanese).

Nichols:
Yep. Don't volunteer just yet though... all this will have to be coded. Shouldn't be too hard, knock on wood.

MYOB : Do you still use BeOS yourselves?

Heber:
Sadly, I have to answer no. I would love to have a BeOS box up and running at home just so I could keep playing around with it, but time has claimed my old BeOS-compatible systems. My primary computer is now a PowerBook G4 running OSX. However, just this past weekend I've managed to resurrect an old x86 box from the parts of 3 other old systems. So maybe I can get some BeOS variant to run on it, although I haven't had time to try yet.

Nichols:
I do from time to time, mainly to play around with cool stuff that shows up on BeBits! I also use OS X most of the time now, but my x86 system is booted into BeOS more often than Windows XP these days. I would like to get back into programming BeOS when I have a little time, it was so much fun!


TBJ : What do you think about the new "spin-offs" such as Zeta, Cosmoe, BlueEyedOS, and the like?

Heber:
I'm sort of split on the issue. I think the spin-offs are good for competition and keeping things alive, but it is too bad there is so much division of labor and loyalties.

Nichols:
Agreed. I'm keeping an eye on their progress though, I'd love to use a Be-ish system more regularly and I look forward to the time when one or more of them has advanced to the point I can do that. Of course the best thing would be if Be, Inc. hadn't gone under in the first place - imagine where we'd be now! R6, definitely! R7 maybe? All the promised audio and multimedia apps? Cool! But it's no use crying over that one anymore.


W.Boeke : Is it true that the BeBits maintainers do not feel themself responsible at all for the contents?

Heber:
I wouldn't say that is true. Basically, we don't promise that things are accurate or up to date simply because there is no way we can guarantee that. There's just too many listings and not enough time. The developers add the listings to BeBits, so we feel it is their responsibility to keep them updated simply because they are in the best possible position to know the status of their own applications.

Nichols:
Yes and no. On BeBits, each entry has always been managed by the developer (or a volunteer in some cases). It helps keep things up to date, makes the information more accurate, and most importantly, lets the site get updated without waiting for us to have to do it manually. It's one of the best things about the site, but also the reason that so many things seem to get stranded. We care about our listings, and I actually spend a considerable amount of time trying to keep things clean.

But it's impossible for us to manage the thousands of listings in the time we have to do it. That's one of the reasons we're looking into having community volunteers help maintain things.


TBJ : What was the reason behind putting up the WIKI?

Heber:
I wrote it simply because I thought it'd be fun to write a wiki. :-) I know there's better wiki software out there, but then again that really wasn't the point at the time. I figured it'd be nice for the BeOS community to have someplace where some general information could go and where it would be retained. BeBits seemed like as good a place as any for something like that, so I stuck it up there and let everyone have at it.

Nichols:
That one is all Sean's. I wasn't even around at the time. :-)


CommdrSozo : Could you guys (if you have time) post some examples of how to use the "current bits" feed on a website for those of us out here that don't know cgi?

Heber:
There's a fair amount of information here, but I suppose a lot of that requires some knowledge of CGI-like technologies.

Nichols:
Hmmm... possibly we could publish a simple HTML page that could be embedded in a frame or an iframe, and that wouldn't require any coding or CGI to take advantage of. I don't think NetPositive can handle iframe's though. I might do that anyway. E-mail us if you care.


TBJ : Are there plans to make more use of XML in the future?

Heber:
I guess I'm not really clear on what you mean by this or where we'd use XML. We have an XML backend feed but that's about it.

Nichols:
As always, if you've got a cool idea (that would be workable), let one of us know...


xfilecsm : Will it be possible in the not too distant future to purchase a DVD image of BeBits?

Heber:
That'd be nice...

Nichols:
This has come up a few times, and once we did make plans to produce a couple of CD's for purchase, but there wasn't enough interest to justify the effort and cost. There's also headaches that aren't immediately obvious; for example, it's not always legal to distribute certain things on a CD. Some developers would let us distribute binaries but not source, or source but not binaries, or neither one.

There's a lot involved. Not to mention that the thing would be out of date by the time it ever got shipped. Still, if there's enough interest...


TBJ : And finally, what are your plans with BeBits for the year 2004?

Heber:
At some point Greg and I intend on sitting down for a day or two and going to town with some modifications. I expect that a volunteer moderation system would be first on the list. Another thing I'd really like to do is merge the dev accounts with the regular BeBits accounts but that could be quite a bit harder than it might seem.

And of course I'd like to address some of the issues with the different flavors of the OS out there and how they are handled during browsing and searching. There are bigger ideas floating around, but I can't promise anything at this point.

Nichols:
I think it's safe to say the community moderator thing will happen, and one way or another, something will be done to help clear up all the broken links plaguing the site. Sean and I have also been kicking around an idea that would be a fairly major revision to BeBits, incorporate a lot of new ideas, fix a lot of things, and change a fair amount of stuff.

Don't want to say too much about that one though, because it's still in the early stages. Overall I think we're doing OK though.

TBJ : Thank you guys for your time and hard work in keeping BeBits online. Thanks too for taking time out to do this interview, it means a lot.

Thanks for the interview Chris, and thanks to the wonderful BeOS community for your continued support of BeBits.
Sean

Thanks for the interview, it was fun and a first for me. :-)
Greg