Until my signing a contract means signing it and a checksum with my private key ... this whole space is flawed.
Why not make that your signature? Could you like, sign the current date with a private key, and write the result into the signature box?
Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
61–70 of 164 posts
Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know that there's nothing stopping an open source project funded as a not for profit from doing the same thing right? If something is hard, that's an argument for making a standard not for profit version of it, so it becomes a common good instead of platform rent seekers keeping out competition by saying it's "too hard".
How do you personally differentiate between “rent seeking” and running a business?
Not the OP, and this isn't something I'm dramatically invested in, but...
Rent seeking would be designing a product for collecting rent (not a one time payment) for a product (e.g. SaS) that doesn't wear out or has separate maintenance costs. Like a house that is rented the value comes from the income stream and it likely is adjusted by something like inflation.
Not renting would be selling a product for a one time fee, perhaps even if there are many customers (you still get to play ticket pricing games like the airlines so different people pay different amounts at different times, but not as variable as rent). Making the product non-transferable blurs the rent line a bit. Also not rental is the maintenance or improvement on the product (or the house) since that is new work that is being done.
It used to be that only physical objects were rented and services were inherently work and required new effort/ingenuity to be solved each time. However, with the introduction of art reproduction (visual, audio, physical) and copyright/patent, as well as, non-perpetual licensing of software this is no longer the case. It's possible to hold a piece of intellectual property and collect perpetual rent with little or no future investment.
It does create a different incentive structure that can be quite customer hostile.
Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#63Until my signing a contract means signing it and a checksum with my private key ... this whole space is flawed.
In Belgium you can digitally sign documents with your e-ID (mandatory ID card issued by the government) and it has the same value as "classic" hand signed documents. I use it myself for everything, whenever I get a PDF I just sign it with my e-ID and send it along its way.
Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you personally differentiate between “rent seeking” and running a business?
When it's 'done' and you keep collecting money, without adding additional value? Like a slumlord who collects rent and does nothing to even maintain the property. Except perhaps vote down YIMBY reforms.
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Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you personally differentiate between “rent seeking” and running a business?
Not the OP, and this isn't something I'm dramatically invested in, but... Rent seeking would be designing a product for collecting rent (not a one time payment) for a product (e.g. SaS) that doesn't wear out or has separate maintenance costs. Like a house that is rented the value comes from the income stream and it likely is adjusted by something like inflation. Not renting would be selling a product for a one time f…
You mean a SAS? The monthly payment goes towards support, maintenance, and further development. Or you could rebuy essentially the same thing every couple years.
Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our solution is currently able to safely sign a document with a digital signature that will make it tamper-proof Who holds the secret key that actually signs the document? If this is in fact a self-hosted, open-source, project then clearly the user does, and they could sign a different, tampered, version of the document after the fact. I would hesitate to use the term "tamper-proof" in that situation. Right now you…
In the hosted version, we sign the document on behalf of the user using our own private key. Our roadmap also has the feature to bring your own cert(not relevant here). As soon as a user signs a document, a copy of the signed document is instantly sent to all the parties involved. This ensures that the signer cannot revoke the documents already signed. If the receiving party tries to modify the document, the signatur…
That's a reasonable, and pragmatic, way to implement this. But I'd still call it "tamper-resistant". One reason why is in situations where senders or recipients have modified something, proving that the _keys_ used to sign the documents were the correct ones can itself be a difficult problem.
Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#67I went to the installation instructions:
https://github.com/OpenSignLabs/OpenSign/blob/main/INSTALLAT...
And it says you can auto-deploy to DigitalOcean (neat) and to a local server, and instructions are included for both.
There's the bit on AWS S3 which makes sense but then no build/install instructions for local deployment. are those somewhere else?
Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know that there's nothing stopping an open source project funded as a not for profit from doing the same thing right? If something is hard, that's an argument for making a standard not for profit version of it, so it becomes a common good instead of platform rent seekers keeping out competition by saying it's "too hard".
How do you personally differentiate between “rent seeking” and running a business?
Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The self hosted version will always be free :)
Your CONTRIBUTING.md file says "By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under its MIT License." Since OpenSign is AGPLv3, why don't you allow contributions under the same license, if the self hosted version will always be free? I'm worried that the purpose of that might be to let you make it proprietary later.
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Re: Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you personally differentiate between “rent seeking” and running a business?
Not the OP, and this isn't something I'm dramatically invested in, but... Rent seeking would be designing a product for collecting rent (not a one time payment) for a product (e.g. SaS) that doesn't wear out or has separate maintenance costs. Like a house that is rented the value comes from the income stream and it likely is adjusted by something like inflation. Not renting would be selling a product for a one time f…
Rent seeking is trying to create a legal/regulatory structure that means you can farm people. E.g. coming to the UK from some countries you need to prove you can speak English. Assuming you can, and you need a waiver on the test, there is a sole organisation you can pay hundreds of pounds to to send them your degree certificate, and for them to say in some government UI "yes, this probably means they can speak English".
It's not just general and optional recurring payments.