Great idea, but Django as back-end is a very bad choice.
Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
341–350 of 484 posts
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#342Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!
Not a Docs question, but I recently came across Grist and I see that Grist is actually listed as a project under la Suite Numerique. On the other hand, Grist Labs (getgrist.com/about) claim to be the developers, are based in the US (NYC), and I couldn't see any mention any EU collaboration on their website. What is the connection here? How does it differ from the governance and funding model of Docs?
I love that you guys are building a suite of next-gen tools rather than just recreating LibreOffice. Seems really smart to me!
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#343I’ve been looking for something like this that also has a Whiteboard feature (think Miro) to deploy self-hosted at a small business. It has taken me these places: Obsidian - has whiteboard, but not collaborative. Sync plugin cannot be self hosted. Open source sync doesn’t have user management. Affine - ditto. Also not completely open source. Logseq - ditto. Some text editing features require advanced knowledge of dat…
I am building Docmost (Open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion).
We have integrated support for Excalidraw, Draw.io and Mermaid diagrams; Plus real-time collaboration.
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also have to disagree here. What Notion has built is amazing. When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work. If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years . I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.…
Notion is some kind of Kanban board, isn't it? I think the point of the parent is that such boards were not invented by Notion, and writing a webapp that essentially allows you to move post-its between columns is not exactly innovative. Which is fine, if it works. We don't always need innovation (actually most of the time we don't). Notion just seems to be super popular for just being a webapp of post-its.
> Notion is some kind of Kanban board, isn't it?
No, it’s not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a Kanban board.
It’s a proprietary cloud-based wiki with support for every more or less mainstream feature (multimedia, databases, AI integration, collaboration, etc.). It’s a bit sluggish and doesn’t have a good mobile story, but if you don’t mind the proprietary aspect, it’s otherwise a polished product.
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.
I also have to disagree here. What Notion has built is amazing. When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work. If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years . I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.…
Notion is good, maybe great for some but small things holding it back from becoming ubiquitous.
Does notion work offline-first yet?
The only copy of my data should not exist solely in an app’s cloud, and I should not need to manually export anything.
Collaboration is nice, still has nothing to do with being offline-first.
Docs looks very promising. Congrats to the remnant he launch.
Another effort that might be a subset of Docs is Anytype - another French effort that seems to be very promising.
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#346Not sure how its different from self hosted outline?
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#347Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!
Not a Docs question, but I recently came across Grist and I see that Grist is actually listed as a project under la Suite Numerique. On the other hand, Grist Labs (getgrist.com/about) claim to be the developers, are based in the US (NYC), and I couldn't see any mention any EU collaboration on their website. What is the connection here? How does it differ from the governance and funding model of Docs? I love that you…
AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.
For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#348I stopped reading at "AGPL". I appreciate the intent but this stuff is impossible to use in practice. Even governments need partners who would likely be hesitant to run it because of that.
It is MIT licensed not AGPL, explicitly to make it easy to use for anyone. AGPL only applies if you want to use MinIO as your object storage
Thanks for clarifying. They just removed the mention of AGPL due to the confusing nature of it. https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/commit/c85224af425261...
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also have to disagree here. What Notion has built is amazing. When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work. If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years . I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.…
Notion is good, maybe great for some but small things holding it back from becoming ubiquitous. Does notion work offline-first yet? The only copy of my data should not exist solely in an app’s cloud, and I should not need to manually export anything. Collaboration is nice, still has nothing to do with being offline-first. Docs looks very promising. Congrats to the remnant he launch. Another effort that might be a sub…
> Does notion work offline-first yet?
It does via a desktop application.
Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't thought about this a ton - but am I wrong that it sounds crazy and inefficient for the government to essentially compete with private industry? It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that actually be better f…
You’re right. That’s economically inefficient, but apparently seems to be the only way to create models that compete with the bigs. IMHO this repo will die within few years, and that’s both a pity and a waste of public money.
Do you any idea of how much collaborative suites cost to government every year? 10's if not 100's of millions! They have millions of public servents. The investement to build Docs is a drop of water in the the ocean in comparison.