Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

For those wondering about the relationship between Mayan EDMS, Paperless and Open Paperless here is a story line summary of the saga.

Roberto Rosario (the creator of Mayan) is a very well known name in the Django, Python, document management, maker, hacking, open health and open source in the goverment circles.

- https://speakerdeck.com/siloraptor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Rosario - https://www.pycon.it/conference/p/roberto-rosario - http://pyvideo.org/djangocon-us-2014/liberation-and-moderniz... - https://cpucadviceletters.org/login/?next=/ - https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/253 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_(software) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rubzEAojf-k

Mayan EDMS was initially released in February 3, 2011 (Wikipedia and git log). In June 2015, Roberto gave a workshop in DjangoCon named From zero to paperless with Mayan EDMS (https://archive.is/FDpYS). Daniel Quinn (the creator of Paperless) also attended and presented at the same DjangoCon event (https://vimeo.com/135907408) and 6 months later after working on it for several months (Daniel's own words), he released Paperless on December 20, 2015 (https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless/commits/master?afte...). By January 24, 2016, Paperless had "exploded in popularity" (https://twitter.com/danielagquinn/status/691242822431830016).

Both projects used Python, Django, same Django 3rd party apps like DjangoSuit, same document consumer model, same OCR engine, REST API, among other things. On the surface it appeared that Paperless was a copy of Mayan EDMS concepts and implementations without giving credit or mention. Many additions were planned for Paperless that were features and implementations already in Mayan (https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/44mh88/scan_ind...).

A separate point of contention was that the name "Paperless" had been in use by other projects much earlier that Daniel's Paperless (https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=paperless&type=). Since there is no trademark on the name or description, other projects appeared with the same name and description (https://github.com/lrnt/paperless).

On March 15, 2016, Daniel presented Paperless at CodeNode (https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/7843-intro-to-paperless).

It was Daniel's February 27, 2016 tweet suggesting to be paid to work on Paperless that sparked the animosity between the users of the two projects (https://twitter.com/danielagquinn/status/703629488932970500).

Many heated debates ensued. Even then, the main critique of Paperless remained technical, but lack of maturity and implemenation was described by one Reddit users as: "I've looked into paperless and it currently lacks a lot of...nearly well everything. Maybe in a year or two" (https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6m9evn/want_to_go_pa...)

On April 9, 2016, Daniel added a reference to Mayan to the documentation of Paperless (https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless/commit/674d54ec3878...).

On April 17, 2016, Daniel posted on his old twitter account: "It looks like my idea for Paperless wasn't all that unique. This other project uses a lot of the same tools: http://www.mayan-edms.com" (https://twitter.com/danielagquinn/status/721726208606646272).

On April 14, 2017, Daniel Quinn posted in his blog a summary of his experiences at DjangoCon Europe 2017 where he mentions meeting Roberto in person. He describes Roberto as a "rival geek" in what appears to be jest and uses positive adjectives to describe Roberto in the rest of the post. (https://danielquinn.org/blog/djangocon-2017/)

On April 16, 2017 Daniel posted a tweet mentioning the popularity Paperless (https://twitter.com/danielagquinn/status/853701257051205632).

The last release of Paperless is made on Sep 9, 2017.

On Oct 18, 2017 Daniel posted: "I changed my Twitter name! This isn't me any more, so if you're looking for me, you should keep head over to @danielagquinn." (https://twitter.com/searchingfortao/status/92077862371561062...). Only 7 commits have been made to Paperless since with the last commit happening on Novermber 5, 2017.

On December 18, 2017 a user named "zhoubear" anounced on Reddit's selfhoted "Open Paperless: Scan, index, and archive all of your paper documents" (https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/7kjocg/scan_ind...). It turned out that Open Paperless was a forked Mayan EDMS with cosmetic changes but with copyrights changed and no attribution to Mayan EDMS. After a much heated debate, copyrights and attributions were restored and the project's description has been updated to show that it is a new front end for Mayan among other usability changes meant for home users.

In 4 days, Open Paperless has surpassed Mayan EDMS in popularity on Github.

No posts or comments from Roberto can be found in reference of Paperless or Open Paperless.

https://twitter.com/search?q=paperless%20from%3Asearchingfor...

- Feb 27, 2016, "I wish I could be paid to work on my side projects like @TheTweetPile and Paperless". (https://twitter.com/danielagquinn/status/703629488932970500)

- Mar 13, 2016, "Added Gratipay" (https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless/commit/500cee1d9d06...)

- Mar 13, 2016, "Gratipay sucks because it depends on PayPal. Long live bitcoin" (https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless/commit/705a5b8a8468...)

- Apr 9, 2016, "Added reference to Mayan EDMS" (https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless/commit/674d54ec3878...)

- Finally on Dec 26, 2016, "Give to the UNHCR" (https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless/commit/9ea39aeecb4f...)

You could store them chronically on paper and do the actual sorting on your computer or server.

How is keeping data local a good idea? Given how often there is a major breach reported, everything points to this being the opposite -- there aren't enough security specialists to go around for every company. Why not take advantage of the work done by the major cloud providers or SaaS companies instead of redoing everything in house all the time. It's like people want to actually solve the same problems over and over for eternity.

> How is keeping data local a good idea?

Sometimes you want to avoid competitors, or foreign governments, or intelligence agencies from accessing your data. Sometimes you want to avoid any kind of tracking or metadata analysis. Sometimes you want to avoid external points of failure.

Often it is cost - even including wages, AWS or GCP are a factor 10 to 100 more expensive than what you can run on rented dedicated systems from a local hoster, or by colocating. Even your own datacenter can be cheaper, and end up with identical uptime.

And then there's a question of trust. A simple question: Would you trust a Chinese SaaS company to securely store all your customer's data, and run all your services? Would you trust a Romanian one? Why would I trust an American one?