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Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

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Re: Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

#52

Post by martin_a »

martin_a wrote: post #11
emteycz wrote: post #3

A fully self-hosted alternative to GMail, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Keep and Google Drive (including the office suite apps), just as user-friendly and capable (in antispam, security, synchronization and so on).

Don't know why the other comment is dead, but Nextcloud/Owncloud might really be a solution to this. I run a Nextcloud instance and it supplies me with: - Calendar through CalDav - Photos through automatic uploading from my Smartphone - Drive, obviously, through Desktop and mobile client All of this could be run on a small managed webhosting with Hetzner (for example), their hosting would also provide you with a doma…

Let me add: If you find yourself short in storage, you can also mount a Hetzner Storage box (or something like that) as an external storage to your Nextloud. That adds 1 TB of storage for 3,50 €/month or sth. like that.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

#53

Post by pc86 »

dkobia wrote: post #8

Any SaaS product that uses a rent seeking marketplace to compensate for missing essential product features. Think Atlassian, Shopify, QuickBooks etc. I was very happy to discover Medusa ( https://www.medusajs.com ) on HN recently, a pretty solid Shopify alternative.

Atlassian's problem isn't a lack of essential features, it's the flood of completely non-essential features that make it impossible to configure correctly without years of experience. It's essentially the opposite of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, each Atlassian app tries to do 150,000 things and does 149,998 of them extremely poorly.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

#54

Post by pc86 »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #46
IgorPartola wrote: post #42

TurboTax and their ilk. Tax software is fucking evil and by having a FOSS version of it we could remove a huge lobbyist by driving them out of business which will then simplify tax filing for everyone.

Every state, county, city, township has it's own tax structures that change every year, it seems. Federal is pretty easy. It's the need for legal review by tax attorneys and CPAs that makes tax software really really hard to make.

This. It's farcical to believe that the hard part of getting around tens (hundreds?) of millions spent on lobbying for regulations, plus managing the constantly evolving tax code and all the legal and financial liability surrounding that, is writing the actual code. That's the easiest part by a factor of 20.

FOSS tax prep software exists, most of it is ok, some of it is pretty good, but it's really a legal and regulatory problem that is not going to be solved by developers.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

#55

Post by pc86 »

leathersoft wrote: post #2

Hands down a solution equivalent to Jira. I see so many devops hacking on top of Jira, it would be so much helpful if there was an open source, totally customizable, solution to manage tickets (as complete as Jira).

What are some of the JIRA features that you see missing from open source implementations?

Re: Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

#58

Post by IgorPartola »

pc86 wrote: post #54
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every state, county, city, township has it's own tax structures that change every year, it seems. Federal is pretty easy. It's the need for legal review by tax attorneys and CPAs that makes tax software really really hard to make.

This. It's farcical to believe that the hard part of getting around tens (hundreds?) of millions spent on lobbying for regulations, plus managing the constantly evolving tax code and all the legal and financial liability surrounding that, is writing the actual code. That's the easiest part by a factor of 20. FOSS tax prep software exists, most of it is ok, some of it is pretty good, but it's really a legal and regula…

As someone working in this field at the moment, what you and the commenter you are replying to are saying is exactly part of the lobbying push by the likes of TurboTax and H&R Block. It’s complex, yes. But the data is publicly available and does not change all that frequently. And of course an effort like this should 100% be subsidized by the government anyways.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?

#60

Post by ale_jacques »

zeeZ wrote: post #28

Confluence. I've been looking for alternatives ever since they did the stupid cloud shove, but I haven't found anything coming close enough and robust enough that I can give to everyone, from developers to sales and HR, without having to worry about teaching them another language.

have you tried XWiki? https://www.xwiki.org/
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