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Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

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Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#421

Post by wvh »

nchagnet wrote: post #6

This is a really great project from both the French and German governments. I think state-funded open source solutions to digital platforms is a fantastic opportunity to get away from the big tech walled gardens. Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future, but the community at least can take over. But until then, it's a nice platform and a nice contribution to the community.

When universities, libraries, government and open-source community could unite and, perhaps most crucially, find a benevolent dictator for life that could shepherd the herd of cats with all noses in one direction instead of getting bogged down in academic or governmental committee mud, we might have Nice Things that are not in the hands of any one party but owned by all (i.e. the tax payer, and volunteers).

Those projects could truly be owned by the public and not solely corporations or government. Clearly data is the big thing, and I don't want to have to trust a government or corporation with access to all of it.

In reality, having been part of some of these projects, they often get bogged down by getting all parties and funding organised, in other words, death by committee.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#422

Post by maxyurk »

bjackman wrote: post #150
thor-rodrigues wrote: post #97

I really like the idea of shifting the business model for office software. Instead of the current model—where companies develop a tool, lock users into their ecosystem, and profit by bundling software with hosting and storage—we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions. This would foster competition based on factors like pricing, encryption, customer support, serv…

> we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions. The Matrix project lead talked at FOSDEM about an issue with this model [0]: a pure market approach to this just doesn't offer any way to fund upstream development. Luckily the public sector ought to be a an arena where we can solve this problem by being englightened consumers instead of just buying from the provider…

JFrog is doing very well financially with an excellent self-hosted offering

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#423

Post by reacharavindh »

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!

One of the things that I rely on with a collection of docs is a usable "full text search". The demo atleast only searches on the titles which only goes so far. It would be very useful for this project to have a proper search solution.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#424

Post by wvh »

k__ wrote: post #416
berkes wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To me, Notion always felt like someone took the concept of a wiki and Jira-fied it. Crazy how such a simple tool can feel so slow and klunky :/

Funny how someone can invent a word such as Jirafied and most of us know exactly what that means.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#425

Post by rdm_blackhole »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #12

Why am I starting to believe that france is now more culturally shited towards being a new super power in this multi polar world instead of USA. Seriously , I never used to really think about france that much , but Emmanuel Macron correcting trump on live air really made me trust france more as a non US citizen.

If you trust E.Macron, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Trump is a liar, but so is Macron.

France's government is working on a law to force the messaging providers to implement a backdoor that would break E-to-E.

Macron has promised to end homelessness before being elected. It never happened. He was supposed to stop the rise of the far right, the far right has never been higher.

He was suppose to simplify France's bureaucracy to help entrepreneurs and trim the fat so that we stop burdening the new generation with crippling debt. The debt has literally exploded under his presidencies, crime is on the rise and Islamism terrorism as well.

His political capital in France has vanished. His party does not control the parliament nor the senate. His own prime minister is not from his party and as such will not implement Macron's agenda.

Macron is more interested in pushing the interests of the EU or Ukraine than those of France itself.

In France, the president is the one who sets the agenda in terms of foreign policy and that is what Macron is focusing on. On the rest of the issues that France is currently facing, he basically has no say on it.

He is basically a lame duck president who has less than 2 years left and can never run again.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#426

Post by rdm_blackhole »

thrance wrote: post #18
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #12

Why am I starting to believe that france is now more culturally shited towards being a new super power in this multi polar world instead of USA. Seriously , I never used to really think about france that much , but Emmanuel Macron correcting trump on live air really made me trust france more as a non US citizen.

That was funny, but as a Frenchman I don't hold too much hope. Our far right, supporting both Trump and Putin, has been gaining steam with each passing election for the past 20 years. Hopefully the circus currently taking place across the pond is enough to deter some from voting for them, come 2027?

The far-right is a symptom of what is happening in France. Fix the problems and the far right will disappear.

Unfortunately, that would mean that the politicians from the last 20 years need to do a mea culpa on quite a few things and that will never happen so the far right will eventually get in power.

Don't blame the players, blame the game.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#427

Post by wvh »

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…

I have worked on open-source software that was government/university funded. It's not uncommon in Europe. And yes, typical death-by-committee issues exist, but there is something to be said for a piece of software that holds people's data and is not outright owned by one government, corporation or random group of cats.

I don't know about the US, but I can see some crucial user data software suites moving to an open-source model where nobody has absolute power over or ownership of the data.

How to get such a multi-player project organised efficiently without burning through a load of money and time is another matter...

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#428

Post by eitland »

tln wrote: post #180
eitland wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Huh? The linked site is https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs which has the commits, readme, code comments, and issues in English. The github description links to https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/ which is available in English, French and German.

The comment I replied to was linking to this:

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#429

Post by wvh »

KronisLV wrote: post #128
afavour wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has an interesting history with Open/LibreOffice. Multiple attempts that ended up going back to Windows, but with fresh attempts that are ongoing: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...

There have been some similar attempts over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Mass_deployments Some larger than others, some attempts at having more negotiating power, others as a cost cutting measure, others yet as just exploration of what's doable. I'd say that LibreOffice is fine for my needs - not great in all respects, but functional. I don't even have MS Office or use Google Docs on any of my…

Maybe we're beyond native software for things like Office suites already. I can see the benefit for always-online multi-user applications that combine text editing with project planning, wiki-like functionality, documentation base and whatnot. Few write office documents to just have them sit on the local hard drive.

The few times I need to use LibreOffice, it's just to export as PDF and send somewhere. That doesn't seem to be the workflow of the future.

Re: Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline

#430

Post by wvh »

jahewson wrote: post #204
fastasucan wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it better that 5 private companies make the same product and compete against each other in marketing? Why should the government buy a product from them, and spend lots of money to tailor it to their needs, without even owning the finished product?

Where do governments get their money from? Taxes on economic activity. The more economic activity the government performs itself, the less opportunity there is to raise tax revenue. Take this through to its logical conclusion and you have the government owning farms, making food, making its own steel, building its own cars, etc. with a corresponding loss of revenue-raising activity in the real economy.

There is this thing called balance. The middle road. Yin Yang. Entities keeping each other in check.
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