Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 484 posts

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#401

Post by stephenr »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #394
KronisLV wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the…

This will be a controversial take here on HN: I'm not too excited about governments getting directly involved in the development of software, let alone open source. With possibly a few exceptions (internal software for national agencies, etc.), it is way outside their area of expertise. I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it. And, the gov't can write the support contract…

> it is way outside their area of expertise

You realise that when governments write software, they just hire software developers, and designers, and project managers like any other organisation does, right?

They're not just asking around in parliament "so who has dabbled in python?" or what have you.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#402

Post by davedx »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #394
KronisLV wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the…

This will be a controversial take here on HN: I'm not too excited about governments getting directly involved in the development of software, let alone open source. With possibly a few exceptions (internal software for national agencies, etc.), it is way outside their area of expertise. I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it. And, the gov't can write the support contract…

Not controversial just ignorant. Various governments have been participating or creating open source for many years now

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#403

Post by Bigpet »

wim wrote: post #52
mrweasel wrote: post #43

Looking at how much infrastructure needs to be spun up, I don't really see this as a good solution for personal note taking. If you use the Docker environment, you spin up 10 or more containers... including KeyClock. I get that this is intended to by hosted by a company or an organisation, but plenty of people are using Notion just as individuals. Most people would be better of with Obsidian, Bear, Notion or even App…

We're working on an "IDE for notes/tasks" [1] in the space of Notion and so on where you can easily self-host the sync backend with a single binary. The idea is that you can choose between cloud or self-host (and "eject" at any time to switch between the two if you ever change your mind). We hope that might be a good balance between some companies or individuals wanting to self-host but still making it accessible whe…

looks neat. Like Acreom, but with better collaboration capabilities.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#404

Post by bayindirh »

slowtrek wrote: post #143
KronisLV wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the…

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.

Notion's data model is incredible, actually. You can embed almost anything into it, and make it work across your knowledge base.

Databases work like spreadsheets, and you can embed pages inside them, too. In fact, every row is a potential page, if you want.

While I prefer Obsidian for my technical (public and private) knowledge bases, life organization, and specific help pages I create for relatives live in Notion, and it works really well. Being able to script and formulate things allows great flexibility.

What I'm not very comfortable yet is "ejecting" from Notion, since the data model is so convoluted, what they give you as a package is not very convenient, yet.

Evernote had the best mechanism, giving you an XML file and an official XSLT to read/verify/transform what they give you. However, Evernote feels very underpowered when you start to use formulae and automation across your database.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#405

Post by slevis »

rtpg wrote: post #372
slevis wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some on the job training to learn to farm. This would only work if the government replacement would be more efficient than Notion (in the sense that the French government employs less people for a product of the same quality).

This one felt obvious, but it feels a bit hard to reason on. How many sales people does this project need? It’s not zero because grants etc but let’s not kid ourselves. I think this project will never spend as much money as notion on devs. Like ever. I will grant that there’s a good idea around “well notion was doing operations for everyone at once so people don’t need as many tech/ops people ”. I’m hopeful that host…

If it feels hard to reason on, it might be a hint... Sales people provide value. Maybe a sales person would have told this project to focus on being an alternative to Notion or Google Docs, as they are different apps/use cases.

The only reason why they might need less developers is because they are a copying an existing product, so less R&D. There is no reason to assume that the teams behind Notion, Outline, Google Docs ... are less effective than the French Government.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#406

Post by Zekio »

IshKebab wrote: post #235
_zoltan_ wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

search is the #1 feature I use in our corporate slack (huge, huge instance). without search it's useless.

It has search, it's just very basic. Only searches for exactly what you put etc. I remember Slack's search being equally crap when I last used it a couple of years ago.

sounds exactly like slacks search, except slack also doesn't find exactly what you put in sometimes... (think the indexing isn't very fast because sometime a day old message is impossible to search for)

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#407

Post by berkes »

slowtrek wrote: post #143
KronisLV wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the…

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.

> very much one of the most reproducible apps ever.

It isn't. The proof is simple: there aren't many reproductions that *tick all the boxes*. And no, "a directory of markdown files" isn't even close, it ticks two, maybe three of the dozens of boxes that notion ticks.

Joplin (my daily driver) and obsidian (can't get to like it) are closer, but certainly not there - though these alternatives tick some boxes that notion doesn't tick. Edit: But most of all, what "boxes notion ticks" very much depends on your (teams) needs and usage. A feature you may deem unimportant or even an anti-feature may very well be what keeps a lot of people on notion because no alternative has it.

The closest I have seen and used is appflowy. In some areas it ticks boxes that notion doesn't. But it's also "0.x" version software: self-admiddetly not 1.x stable software. And this has been in the makings since nov 2021, so over three years. Over three years of development to get to a point that it's on-par-ish with Notion.

If it takes a team three years to reproduce "the most reproducible app", it's clear that this app isn't that reproducible at all. And that's just reproducing features (amongst witch UX and UI). Reproducible also includes familiarity: It's almost a no-brainer to get a team on notion and to have management pay a pro licence. It's much harder, to impossible, to do this with [insert any alternative].

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#408

Post by virdev »

u_sama wrote: post #389
virdev wrote: post #296

Hey 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!

Hi, thanks for the project and contributing a nice European alternative to Outline. I had a few questions relating to Docs as it seems a nice alternative I want to integrate in our company. - Is it a project funded directly by the Governments or by the NGI funds? - Is there an extensibility via plugins or other in the future thought for integrations ? - Is the ProConnect the only way or can one use a self-hosted OIDC…

Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit) received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us know if you get it running docs@numerique.gouv.fr would love to hear your feedback as a reuser.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#409

Post by virdev »

andyferris wrote: post #342
virdev wrote: post #296

Hey 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…

> The French government agency ANCT Données et Territoires has also made significant contributions to the codebase.

From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#410

Post by Lutger »

phtrivier wrote: post #308
atmosx wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macron’s approval ratings must be below 3% by now. If he had any backbone, he’d resign immediately.

You made me look : it's about 27% [1], which is of course not great, but actually not that bad _for him_, _in the past few years_. The political landscape is completely split in 3 thirds in France at the moment, and people stay firmly in their lanes. It would need an incredibly popular décision to bring anyone from the left or far right to approve of him. [1] https://www.latribune.fr/la-tribune-dimanche/politique/bar…

Thanks for actually looking things up instead of dreaming things up. This reminds me of Trumps claim that Zelensky is a hugely impopulair dictator, whereas in fact his approval ratings far exceed Trumps and he is very much legally chosen.

Misinformation is a disease.

Post reply on HN