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OpenProject – open-source project management software

openproject.org

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Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#31

Post by neilv »

nisten wrote: post #28

Getting the wrong vibes from the dark patterns on this site. I click on github.. it doesn't open github... had to look in the comments here. I find repo here... the front end is some ancient angular app with 3 year old security vulnerabilities. I try to find some kind of demo of the product.. and end up in a sales funnel to pay 500$ As a first impression this does not look like a trustworthy opensomething .org produc…

Agreed. In traditional terms, they're using a .org domain as a .com. The old rules aren't enforced, but they still hold some meaning.

It sounds like they want to do a "community edition", so they could just do it from a .com, and set expectations appropriately.

If they instead wanted to have a community-developed open source project, but also sell derived/layered products, they might set up a community governance structure and home it on the .org, at arm's length from their .com where they do sales and other company-specific stuff.

(BTW, sympathy on the challenges of building a sustainable business on open source, especially given some of the poor taste we sometimes see from freeloading commercial competitors.)

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#32

Post by input_sh »

j45 wrote: post #17
input_sh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think every open source projects that has ever aimed to have >10 employees has taken that same route at some point: GitLab, Matomo, WordPress, Redis, MySQL, nginx, HAProxy... all incredibly useful for in most use cases completely free, but if you try to really rely on them (on a large enough scale), you will hit that paywall at some point and feel forced to pay up. If the goal is to have In summary, I personally be…

Every is pretty broad. The pragmatism of self-hosting is key parts of the software will be missing and you may not get a comparable experience. The issue is not charging. The issue is where key, and actually core, functionality is sitting on the paid side. The idea that "at some point" you hit a paywall is generally not true. It can border on crippleware, and might as well be shareware (still great to support small d…

> It's far easier to financially support fully open source software even though it might not happen as much as it should.

Sorry for nitpicking, but this is the only thing you've said that I actually disagree with.

It is a hell of a fight to convince a company (or even worse, a non-profit) to pay for something that they could get for $0 by self-hosting. Symbolic, one-time gestures are possible to fight for, but a reocurring, significant amount is just not. If your open source project offers anything back in return for payment, it's a much easier sell to make. It doesn't have to be complicated or introduce a lot of overhead, it just has to be something, even it's like a very rarely relied on line of support or a logo on the homepage. Same goes for premium features, you just have to strike that right balance, which I believe we both fully agree on. Your tool has to be useful as a free, standalone product, at least up to a certain scale. I have my grudges about where that line gets drawn sometimes, but I can't hold a grudge about the exististence of such a line. It doesn't stop me from testing out your product.

It is of course a shame that we don't have to go through any of this for any fully proprietary product. It is what it is, it's just a question of whether it's worth the per-user price. There are tons of companies out there that have used an open source product for years, never paid a single dime, and then switched to a proprietary, very expensive solution.

There's also a lot of us disgruntled sysadmin/DevOps/SRE people along the way, but our powers are limited. Make it a little bit easier for us by charging for something we can't otherwise get from your free version. It's mutually beneficial for everyone involved: we do our best to give you some money (in return for something), sometimes we're succesful, and then that success usually contributes back to the fully open sourced version being better in some ways.

Individual donations are fine, I do them as well (less consistently than I'd like to; far from nothing), but convincing just one single company to pay up beats the hell out of 100 individuals. It's a fixed, agreed upon sum, usually guaranteed for a period of time by some type of a contract. There's also only one processing fee involved. It is always gonna be difficult to find that first one, but if you pull it off, the odds of your open source project "succeeding" (however you define success) increases dramatically.

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#34

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

This project was picked up (and forked) by Rosatom for its internal Jira replacement after they got cut off from Jira in spring of 2022. No idea how many changes they introduced, but I guess OpenProject should be powerful enough (or at least provide a powerful enough base to build upon) to handle giant projects at their scale. The fork is not publicly accessible, although they do conform to the GPL and provide the source code to their clients.

https://habr.com/ru/companies/greenatom/articles/814589

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#35

Post by SahAssar »

input_sh wrote: post #14
j45 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenProject is generally open source. Some key features exist outside of the open source license. Their hosted options though, seem reasonably priced.

I think every open source projects that has ever aimed to have >10 employees has taken that same route at some point: GitLab, Matomo, WordPress, Redis, MySQL, nginx, HAProxy... all incredibly useful for in most use cases completely free, but if you try to really rely on them (on a large enough scale), you will hit that paywall at some point and feel forced to pay up. If the goal is to have In summary, I personally be…

There are clearly examples of fully open open-source with more than 10 people working on them, like linux, postgresql, etc.

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#36

Post by input_sh »

benrutter wrote: post #22
input_sh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think every open source projects that has ever aimed to have >10 employees has taken that same route at some point: GitLab, Matomo, WordPress, Redis, MySQL, nginx, HAProxy... all incredibly useful for in most use cases completely free, but if you try to really rely on them (on a large enough scale), you will hit that paywall at some point and feel forced to pay up. If the goal is to have In summary, I personally be…

I agree with your main point, but I can't resist pointing out some huge exceptions since there are some mammoth fully open projects like: - The linux kernel - Languages (Rust, Python) - Airflow - Libre Office Either way, I think the important thing is knowing why you want something to be open source (do you want to self host? Own your data? Fix bugs? Do you have doubts that the developing company will last long?) Som…

All completely valid counter-arguments. In my defence my perspective is very narrow towards only self-hostable open source tools. Like the types you might wanna self-host in a company anywhere between 10 and 200 employees. I don't have any knowledge of, say, open source libraries and how they operate, and the same applies to all of the exceptions you've listed except LibreOffice.

To be even more specific: I was responsible for maintaining three OpenProject installations in three completely different places. One is a small non-profit that couldn't realistically afford anything else, one is a cheap and very poorly-managed for-profit company, and one is a much larger non-profit that ultimately ended up paying for some "better" proprietary solution. The only things I could think of that those three places have in common are: I worked there, and OpenProject was used to some extent, even if only briefly. And it was never because of me! Other people have made that decision, but it was my responsibility to maintain it.

That's why I'm so opinionated in this thread.

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#37

Post by barfbagginus »

input_sh wrote: post #14
j45 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenProject is generally open source. Some key features exist outside of the open source license. Their hosted options though, seem reasonably priced.

I think every open source projects that has ever aimed to have >10 employees has taken that same route at some point: GitLab, Matomo, WordPress, Redis, MySQL, nginx, HAProxy... all incredibly useful for in most use cases completely free, but if you try to really rely on them (on a large enough scale), you will hit that paywall at some point and feel forced to pay up. If the goal is to have In summary, I personally be…

I think you sell short the promise of true open source, which gives us much more than what open core can offer, in a more sustainable way. I find it endearing that you in effect attack purists for not being thankful for unusable crapheaps like gitlab. Let's admit those projects were all relevant a decade ago , but have all become very stagnant and painful to use our maintain because of their open core fragmentation and technical debt in the open product. I know they have been replaced in my own usage and orgs.

Imagine if Linux was Open Core, and we were supposed to be thankful for even that, and pay the Linux foundation for Linux Pro if we needed a commercial grade kernel. That'd be like having to buy AT&T Unix again, right? There would be a fork in order, right? Too much has been sacrificed to accept a partly non free kernel.

But suddenly this idea comes along that the project needs to support a company on its back. And suddenly the company only cares about delivering the bare minimum open source than is necessary to annoy clients into the Enterprise version. The open product chokes, and a real open competitor appears. We migrate from gitlab to gitea, from MySQL to MariaDB, from redis to valkey, and so on.

Open source is more important than your or my company. If either open source or our company has to die, it's far better to elect for our company to die, rather than threaten open source. Likewise, any company that threatens open source with the open core model will eventually fail or fall behind genuine open source competitors.

If you build a company on open source, why not let it be fully free, selling services, support, and consulting? I think the days of Open-Washing via Open Core are coming to an end. The last 15 years have seen it betray so many previously lively communities. I strongly believe that in the future, open projects will have to be fully open to merit credit, or the community will immediately recognize them as bad actors, and standardize on a truly open alternative.

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#38

Post by eddd-ddde »

neilv wrote: post #31
nisten wrote: post #28

Getting the wrong vibes from the dark patterns on this site. I click on github.. it doesn't open github... had to look in the comments here. I find repo here... the front end is some ancient angular app with 3 year old security vulnerabilities. I try to find some kind of demo of the product.. and end up in a sales funnel to pay 500$ As a first impression this does not look like a trustworthy opensomething .org produc…

Agreed. In traditional terms, they're using a .org domain as a .com. The old rules aren't enforced, but they still hold some meaning. It sounds like they want to do a "community edition", so they could just do it from a .com, and set expectations appropriately. If they instead wanted to have a community-developed open source project, but also sell derived/layered products, they might set up a community governance str…

I had no idea TLDs had any form of "semantics".

TIL dot com is apparently a "commercial" site.

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#39

Post by NikolaNovak »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #38
neilv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In traditional terms, they're using a .org domain as a .com. The old rules aren't enforced, but they still hold some meaning. It sounds like they want to do a "community edition", so they could just do it from a .com, and set expectations appropriately. If they instead wanted to have a community-developed open source project, but also sell derived/layered products, they might set up a community governance str…

I had no idea TLDs had any form of "semantics". TIL dot com is apparently a "commercial" site.

They used to.

.gov for government,.edu for education, etc. Certainly I would not expect a purely commercial entity on a ".org"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain

P.s. You're making me feel old :-)

Re: OpenProject – open-source project management software

#40

Post by neilv »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #38
neilv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In traditional terms, they're using a .org domain as a .com. The old rules aren't enforced, but they still hold some meaning. It sounds like they want to do a "community edition", so they could just do it from a .com, and set expectations appropriately. If they instead wanted to have a community-developed open source project, but also sell derived/layered products, they might set up a community governance str…

I had no idea TLDs had any form of "semantics". TIL dot com is apparently a "commercial" site.

Yep, earlier on, the non-country-code ones had rules about who could use them, and the registrar for some of those was expected to be a custodian.

Then they seemed to focus more on making money from registrations, than from the custodian aspect.

Then ICANN created an industry of middleperson (maybe because there shouldn't just be one rent-seeker, but competing ones), and also seemed to bless a market of landgrabbing squatters. (And much more recently, some ICANN-connected people seemed to be scheming to grab a popular TLD for themselves, like a PE firm.)

With most of the good and even bad domain names taken by squatters, there was demand for all sorts of new TLDs (which someone was happy to middleperson).

As well as the risky practice of building your company atop a 2-letter country code TLD, where there's a significant chance of a change in government policy would break a lot of your links, URLs embedded in software, email addresses, and Googlejuice. Or simply have you over a barrel with exorbitant renewal fees (or bribes).

(Historically, some of these ccTLDs were small islands, where there was one sysadmin person running the "ISP" for the island, including domain name authority, and the government didn't necessarily even know/understand.)

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