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Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

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Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question and thanks for pointing it out -- we'll make sure to address this on the website. In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up -- each work function already has a home. The thing you have to decide is how you want to see the tasks. Our "home" sc…

> In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up I'm not sure what this means entirely, but across our projects we have some with different workflows than the others. These are necessary in that we have certain workflows that must meet compliance requirements, a…

The problem most users face when starting out with Jira (or any other tool for that matter) is they don't know how to get started with a process. Leantime starts with some pre-defined worfklows following industry best practices. You can still update statuses and other items on a per project base later once you are comfortable using the tool.

Something that all pm tools have in common these days is that they are glorified task lists with different visualization options. This is not project management. In Leantime you track and work towards goals/outcomes, you see your metrics change and know what impact your work has. Additionally we added a variety of research/strategy focused boards such as Lean Canvas, Business Model Canvas, SWOT etc to allow you to define products and features deliberately and in a central location. This helps to align your entire team.

The docs (while admittedly not as powerful as confluence) keep your documentation where it needs to be (with the project) rather than having to switch between sites.

Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a Jira workflow, there's a lot of customization required and a lot of thought needed to go into how to set up your workflow. Leantime is intended to be "opinionated" in the way that it's already set up I'm not sure what this means entirely, but across our projects we have some with different workflows than the others. These are necessary in that we have certain workflows that must meet compliance requirements, a…

The problem most users face when starting out with Jira (or any other tool for that matter) is they don't know how to get started with a process. Leantime starts with some pre-defined worfklows following industry best practices. You can still update statuses and other items on a per project base later once you are comfortable using the tool. Something that all pm tools have in common these days is that they are glori…

Thank you for the responses, I'll dig further into the service.

Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with AGPL?

Affero is effectively bait-and-switch.

That is BS. Affero is not any different to GPL but the fact that network distribution is included in its definition of "distributing software" and having to relicense under the same license.

Where do you even get this from?

Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affero is effectively bait-and-switch.

That is BS. Affero is not any different to GPL but the fact that network distribution is included in its definition of "distributing software" and having to relicense under the same license. Where do you even get this from?

Call it what makes you warm and fuzzy.

Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use."

The pattern is effectively always the same. Many companies use this license to offer a free version while offering a "way out" by providing an "enterprise license". They get you hooked because it's open source. But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you.

It's a matter of personal choice. I choose NOT to use any Affero licensed software if I can help it.

Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#26
post #4

[flagged]

I am really not savvy with the open source licenses, but why did you dislike the Affery license model ?

Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use."

Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is BS. Affero is not any different to GPL but the fact that network distribution is included in its definition of "distributing software" and having to relicense under the same license. Where do you even get this from?

Call it what makes you warm and fuzzy. Here's from Leantime's own FAQ ( https://leantime.io/pricing/ ): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use." The pattern is effectively always the same. Many companies use this license to offer a free version while offering a "way out" by providing an "enterpr…

I think there is a misunderstanding of the license(s) here:

"But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you"

Neither GPL nor AGPL require you to submit anything back (or charges you) for changes made to your system for your own usage. Even if it is within a company. It is about preventing distributing derivates to the public under closed source licenses.

You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license.

There is no baiting here.

Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#28
I keep looking at various JIRA alternatives, but no good finds so far. This is definitely not it.

I don't really like the idea of bug tracker as a sort of a GUI program that acts like time management software, i.e. focuses on planning work, tracking how much effort was spent, ability to add notes to tasks etc.

My ideal bug-tracking software works more like Git: it has a server-client relationship where clients query the database with predefined set of commands, while at the same time it has programmable interface facing test code. This interface should enable tests to do things like:

* figure out what components need tests to run against them when a particular feature branch sees a code update.

* extract history of tests running against a defined group of features.

* manage association of tests and program components.

* manage test sets that aren't feature-related (eg. nightlies).

JIRA kind of has this database / query component, but all the functionality above needs to be built on top of it. And the data organization of JIRA relies on issues as the basic unit, where I'd like the basic component to be "features" (similar to how branches are in Git).

My biggest problem with the currently popular approach (emphasis on time management) is that it's very informal and unstructured when it comes to testing, poorly automated and poorly integrated with other development tools to the point that it makes it both easy to forget to do the necessary stuff and a very repetitive chore to keep the necessary stuff up-to-date, while it's clear that it's possible to automate it.

The attempts to automate this process by adding bots that manage issue life-cycle or generate trivial fixes / merge trivial PRs isn't the way to solve the problem, IMO because this automation is stupid and has a potential to cause harm. Instead it needs to be very tightly integrated with VCS (but, let's be honest, with Git) to the point that such configuration would require minimal effort on the part of the admin and be vendor-independent, and, most importantly, be feature-oriented to mirror how programmers conceptualize the development of their program.

Re: Leantime: Open-Source Jira Alternative

#30
post #29

I quite liked it but last time I checked there was no GitHub integration and that's I would say one of the top features, as every card we complete we want to have PR/Commit attached to it in development lifecycle.

Thanks, and I agree. We spend the last 4 months working on a plugin infrastructure including events, api, plugin management etc so that we can now focus on building integrations. The next 3 months or so will be heads down integration work.
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