GitLab Community Edition is MIT licensed. I don't know that it gets much more open source than that. I've survived at very very large companies on CE, never needing any of the paid features.
It's pretty trivial to emulate with a bit of code as a bot and the "conversations must be closed" setting.
But if you're relying on that feature rather than just agreeing, training, and trust, then I'm also not sure that's the best way to go about it. I'd personally much rather be somewhere where the rule is flexible and can be left to the MR submitter to decide when it's important to have more eyes on a change.
Open core is a business model not a license. You can download GitLab CE and use it under MIT license. You can use all the features it contains and do whatever you want with the code. Yes, GitLab Inc. has other products and some of them are paid, but that doesn't change the fact that GitLab CE is open source.
For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason.
The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privacy and adblocking tools.
It suffers from the same technical deficiencies as Chrome (installing addons is harder than it should be, addon API is weak compared to firefox, Google controls the "store" for extensions), but I'd recommend it over any other Chromium-based browser.
My particular gripe with BAT is noted here[0] and AFAIK nothing has changed; you still have to use their KYC-compliant platform to ever exchange BAT for real-world money, as they'd much rather you re-donate the BAT to websites via brave's reward system instead of ever exchanging for USD.
Other problems that they'd had:
- were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us".
- They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2]
You can still donate your BATs to institutions and websites (or should I say "pay for not having ads", at least this is what is being marketed for). I mostly contribute to wikipedia, as it is always in need of new donations and I like the idea of not having trackers/ads on it.
People on HN can both like that some piece of software is OSS and dislike it for other reasons. For example, Chromium is also open source, and most criticisms of "Chrome" aren't exactly limited to the closed-source additions (like Widevine and enhanced grammar fixing) Google puts in after the fact, eg. Manifest v3 which will touch both Chromium and Chrome.
Interesting, I don't think I've noticed the same criticism for Brave. But many times when it has come up in discussions at work, people will say they don't want to use it and don't trust it because Brendan Eich is behind it. He donated money to Prop 8 in California many years ago (which at the time, was very popular. More than half the people in California supported it), and he was fired/cancelled for it (long before the term "cancel culture" was a thing). Unfortunately for Eich, the culture shifted radically during that time, and he became a target (see OkCupid[1]). IIRC it was like 7 or 8 or so years after Prop 8 that the news leaked, and like most Americans Eich had changed his mind on it. But it didn't/doesn't matter, he has been branded and is forever tainted.
Oh interesting, no I don't have a source for that. Just something I've read a bunch of times. Probably falls into the "if you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes true" (although I don't know that there was nefarious motives behind it, could be honest mistakes like mine)
There have been ... incidents in their development.
At one point they misrepresented themselves as collecting donations for bloggers who a) had no relation with Brave and b) didn't want donations or monetisation of their content.
At another point it seemed like they were intercepting ads on pages and replacing them with their own ads. Not sure exactly what the truth of that situation is.
Yeah, tokenisation, BAT etc. HN is extremely sceptical about cryptocurrency, IMHO with very good reason.
As mentioned by another user - under the covers they inserted their own referral codes into links to online vendors.
All in all it's a sequence of dodgy decisions that tell me they put money above honesty.
Also, because their build system is closed source; my personal perspective is that if I cannot build your project, it is not "open source"
I have taken some inspiration from AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brave) and I think I got it to compile all the way through once, but that's not nearly the same as how easy it is to build -- and then run -- Firefox every day
Probably because it's a browser wrapped in a crypto wallet, and there is virtually no use case for cryptocurrencies that are not powered by scams or crime.
I'm not saying there couldn't be, but so far, the entire ecosystem is just burning gigawatts of energy to sell jpegs of monkeys.
Oh yeah, and it removes ads from web pages and then shows its own. I'm always surprised people aren't more offended by that.
i use brave and i have never used its crypto tooling. it's effectively an up-to-date chromium fork with a bunch of extra features and privacy-respecting defaults.
Yeah, AT managed to gather good non-spammy ratings somehow—even though I do sometimes suspect that certain high ratings are artificial, but those are isolated cases. The site also clearly prioritizes open-source software, raising it even among higher-rated proprietary apps.
Since AT is crowdsourced, perhaps instead of discussing yet another list of alternatives, fellow HNers could go upvote software that they already use. Though this does require registration, of course.
What do people use as an alternative to SQS? I've had Kafka mentioned a few times but that's way heavier/more complicated than I need. Just a simple queue is perfect, and SQS' API is gloriously simple.
Redis has a simple (but extremely powerful) Pub/Sub implementation[1] that should get you going for a long time.
Postgres also have a simple notify API[2] you can mix it with your own tables and just "notify" that some changes were made (when people say you can do anything with postgres nowadays they are not joking).
You probably can also roll your own implementation in any ACID database. Just keep adding records to an event table and consume them in scheduled batches. Should be more than enough for non real-time applications.
(Some history: the privacytoolsio website was created by the subreddit r/privacytoolsio. A while ago the founder was kicked out after being inactive for over a year, but that founder happened to own the website domain and refused to give it to the remaining moderators. The founder also started adding affiliate links into the privacytoolsio website. So the remaining mods decided to rebrand completely, creating a new sub r/privacyguides and a new website as well. You can read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rpriv...)
Brave is listed there as an open source alternative to Firefox (as well as Chrome and Edge). But isn't Firefox (which itself is not listed on this website) open source as well or am I missing something?
> All Brave logos, marks and designations are trademarks or registered trademarks of Brave. All other trademarks mentioned in this website are the property of their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed on this website may not be used without the prior written consent of Brave or their respective owners. Portions, features and/or functionality of Brave’s products may be protected under Brave patent applications or patents.
I'm just wondering why Brave is mentioned and Firefox not, especially since they already mention Firefox (as Brave being an alterantive to it)
It kinda implies Firefox not being open source
Verdaccio is an NPM registry server implementation, for hosting private packages. NPM doesn't provide an implementation for the server, they have their own closed source version that they provide as a free/tiered SAAS. The CLI and API specification are open source though
This looks beautiful. Are the alternatives simply listed in order by their GitHub stars? How do you handle projects hosted on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Surely it wouldn't be fair to do a 1-1 comparison, right?
Have you looked at alternatives to your site like AlternativeTo and LibHunt? Do you plan on using any of that data as well or perhaps even linking to pages on those relevant sites? Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but I feel like being able to take advantage of the work already done by those platforms in some way could be a big step towards setting you apart. Just saying as someone who uses/contributes to AlternativeTo a lot
> Are the alternatives simply listed in order by their GitHub stars?
No specific algorithm for now, but that is a good idea.
Yes, I have seeded the data from multiple open source projects for now. But I will also check how can I leverage APIs or maybe scraping to gather relevant data to this project. Libhunt and Saashub are under CC4 but not alternative.to I guess.
It would be great if such a site gave a SCORE for the open sourceness of the product in question. It has been becoming more and more common to have "open source" projects that are either not developed in the open, or not provide all the functionality needed without buying the "enterprise" version. Some projects don't provide installable binaries on some or all platforms either. Other metrics could be having an up to date repo, number of committers, number of recent bugs/issues not acknowledged in their repo etc.
I have noted and will add to roadmap. Score will be calculated differently for different categories of software. Like for Desktop apps and SAAS projects, metrics will be different. Will have to think through this.
You might want to add some tags to the Vaultwarden entry - I was just in the process of submitting it because it wasn't tagged under password managers, when I stumbled across it by accident when looking for the original Bitwarden entry.
As others point out, there are a few of these alternatives that are a little off. They're not wrong as such, it's just not the complete picture.
Grafana is listed as an New Relic alternative, but if you ever used New Relic to do application monitoring on a Python application I think you would be disappointed. There's a huge difference in being able to view and navigate collected metrics and then just having an agent collect everything and UI that will allow you to pin point exactly where your code is slow.
The platform itself is not even source available. I think it's a bit disingenuous in that case. At Windmill (https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill), we are actually building the OSS platform that you can self-host and that is an actual OSS alternative to ... pipedream.
There is no central storage of data, data are stored on each monitored system in a database called dbengine, that's all. Cool, right? They do have a data privacy page: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/cloud/data-privacy
There is nothing paid, everything is free, both the agent and the cloud app. Do whatever you like with it. There is a pricing policy that will follow sometime in the future but everything that is free today seems that will remain free forever.
As far as I'm aware it is actually free for both agent and cloud. What do they have now is more than enough to understand the root of the issue.
It is ok to pay in the future for SSO.
My concern is not money at that moment, but the foot print on production system as data will be stored and queried next to prod with recently introduced anomaly advisor on top.
Netdata doesn't have any paid service at the moment, event the Cloud service is free.
There are plans in the future for some paid plan but it won't remove features, it is more on having longer retention on metadata, role based access, support, etc.
The Netdata Agent is open source and you can self host your whole setup if you want. If you don't like the work, or don't know how to put it up yourself, and want to run multiple nodes, setup parent-child relations for your whole infra you can do it with Netdata Cloud (closed source). But even still, it only collects metrics, there's no actions or other data besides metadata being collected. What exactly is bait-and-switch with this model?
I love the idea of these crowd-sourced systems, but is there any appetite to open source the data behind them?
In theory the collective knowledge of all of these platforms could converge on a single data-source that's freely available to analyse in any way we see fit, but more often the knowledge is behind the platform and ends up gated behind a Pro or commercial edition and the crowd is left to rebuild it again on some other platform...
Are you only listing projects on GitHub (i clicked on a bunch of projects and they all had the GitHub logo)? If so, kinda weird that at the top of the Developer Tools category most of the entries are about GitHub alternatives that anything using them would never show up in the site :-P
Anyone here managed to like Odoo?
It's the first ERP system I work with and the experience is sobering so far.
- no useful documentation aka read the code bro, it's open source
- "FIXME don't ever do this" comments all over the code base
- no update routine: download source of enterprise edition, patch your private repo, feed it in your CD/CI. I'm pretty sure vulnerabilities get patched quickly all over the world ;)
- weird design decisions like undocumented semantics for identifiers (variables, module names etc.)
- Python/JS/XML code living in the database (i.e. need the production DB to develop/test)
- performance
- addons needed for serious business use cases are not open source
- code quality of third party addons is a nightmare
Maybe this is still harmless compared to its competitors, I don't know...
Sentry is among these products that are open-source but hardly self-hostable.
I mean, unless you fancy an Ops team to run your error reporting. But generally speaking, unless you have extreme privacy concerns, the economics favor SaaS subscriptions.
109 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadBut if you're relying on that feature rather than just agreeing, training, and trust, then I'm also not sure that's the best way to go about it. I'd personally much rather be somewhere where the rule is flexible and can be left to the MR submitter to decide when it's important to have more eyes on a change.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Why is it being so heavily criticized on HN ( from what I saw whenever it comes up )?
For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason.
The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privacy and adblocking tools.
It suffers from the same technical deficiencies as Chrome (installing addons is harder than it should be, addon API is weak compared to firefox, Google controls the "store" for extensions), but I'd recommend it over any other Chromium-based browser.
The old (insecure) firefox extension api is long gone.
Other problems that they'd had:
- were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us".
- They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2]
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826
1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh...
2: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...
Edit: better wording
Just interested, as they announced they were discontinuing cryptocurrency donations in general a short while ago.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536
At one point they misrepresented themselves as collecting donations for bloggers who a) had no relation with Brave and b) didn't want donations or monetisation of their content.
At another point it seemed like they were intercepting ads on pages and replacing them with their own ads. Not sure exactly what the truth of that situation is.
Yeah, tokenisation, BAT etc. HN is extremely sceptical about cryptocurrency, IMHO with very good reason.
As mentioned by another user - under the covers they inserted their own referral codes into links to online vendors.
All in all it's a sequence of dodgy decisions that tell me they put money above honesty.
I have taken some inspiration from AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brave) and I think I got it to compile all the way through once, but that's not nearly the same as how easy it is to build -- and then run -- Firefox every day
I'm not saying there couldn't be, but so far, the entire ecosystem is just burning gigawatts of energy to sell jpegs of monkeys.
Oh yeah, and it removes ads from web pages and then shows its own. I'm always surprised people aren't more offended by that.
Really great crowd-sourced recommendations with useful reviews.
Though while AlternativeTo allows filtering by open-source status, it doesn't do so by license.
Since AT is crowdsourced, perhaps instead of discussing yet another list of alternatives, fellow HNers could go upvote software that they already use. Though this does require registration, of course.
Redis has a simple (but extremely powerful) Pub/Sub implementation[1] that should get you going for a long time.
Postgres also have a simple notify API[2] you can mix it with your own tables and just "notify" that some changes were made (when people say you can do anything with postgres nowadays they are not joking).
You probably can also roll your own implementation in any ACID database. Just keep adding records to an event table and consume them in scheduled batches. Should be more than enough for non real-time applications.
[1]: https://redis.io/docs/manual/pubsub/ [2]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-notify.html
Interesting - I had just assumed everyone is doing MQTT or cloud pub/sub
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Remove the "author=dang" and you can see that it's not a sentiment rarely (ever?) expressed by anyone else.
Then they wouldn't be mod comments.
not a sentiment rarely (ever?) expressed by anyone else.
This is unsurprising given other people rarely if ever publicly moderate HN.
https://ethical.net/resources/
https://switching.software/
https://www.privacytools.io/
https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives
https://opensourcesoftwaredirectory.com/
I think if alternativeto.net just adds a setting to only view FLOSS alternatives maybe this genre of websites would be threatened
https://www.privacyguides.org/
(Some history: the privacytoolsio website was created by the subreddit r/privacytoolsio. A while ago the founder was kicked out after being inactive for over a year, but that founder happened to own the website domain and refused to give it to the remaining moderators. The founder also started adding affiliate links into the privacytoolsio website. So the remaining mods decided to rebrand completely, creating a new sub r/privacyguides and a new website as well. You can read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rpriv...)
I would put mastodon as a competitor of Facebook, don't you?
> All Brave logos, marks and designations are trademarks or registered trademarks of Brave. All other trademarks mentioned in this website are the property of their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed on this website may not be used without the prior written consent of Brave or their respective owners. Portions, features and/or functionality of Brave’s products may be protected under Brave patent applications or patents.
> Verdaccio
> Open Source Alternative to npm
in lieu of https://github.com/npm
https://ossdatabase.com
Recently released code under AGPL-3.(https://github.com/prithvi16/ossdatabase)
But I want to go beyond aggregation and add following things
- User reviews, ratings
- Researcherd guides comparing features in most common usecases
- Interviews with Opensource maintainers, founders.
- Being able to create collections like awesome lists
- Everything being user editable and basic karma system for accepted edits.
Edits: Formatting and added links.
Have you looked at alternatives to your site like AlternativeTo and LibHunt? Do you plan on using any of that data as well or perhaps even linking to pages on those relevant sites? Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but I feel like being able to take advantage of the work already done by those platforms in some way could be a big step towards setting you apart. Just saying as someone who uses/contributes to AlternativeTo a lot
> Are the alternatives simply listed in order by their GitHub stars?
No specific algorithm for now, but that is a good idea.
Yes, I have seeded the data from multiple open source projects for now. But I will also check how can I leverage APIs or maybe scraping to gather relevant data to this project. Libhunt and Saashub are under CC4 but not alternative.to I guess.
I have noted and will add to roadmap. Score will be calculated differently for different categories of software. Like for Desktop apps and SAAS projects, metrics will be different. Will have to think through this.
Grafana is listed as an New Relic alternative, but if you ever used New Relic to do application monitoring on a Python application I think you would be disappointed. There's a huge difference in being able to view and navigate collected metrics and then just having an agent collect everything and UI that will allow you to pin point exactly where your code is slow.
The platform itself is not even source available. I think it's a bit disingenuous in that case. At Windmill (https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill), we are actually building the OSS platform that you can self-host and that is an actual OSS alternative to ... pipedream.
If you mean the paid registry thing that they sell, which allows you to keep track of your installations of Netdata on multiple servers, then no.
There is nothing paid, everything is free, both the agent and the cloud app. Do whatever you like with it. There is a pricing policy that will follow sometime in the future but everything that is free today seems that will remain free forever.
It is ok to pay in the future for SSO.
My concern is not money at that moment, but the foot print on production system as data will be stored and queried next to prod with recently introduced anomaly advisor on top.
There are plans in the future for some paid plan but it won't remove features, it is more on having longer retention on metadata, role based access, support, etc.
You can find more details here https://www.netdata.cloud/pricing/
In theory the collective knowledge of all of these platforms could converge on a single data-source that's freely available to analyse in any way we see fit, but more often the knowledge is behind the platform and ends up gated behind a Pro or commercial edition and the crowd is left to rebuild it again on some other platform...
- no useful documentation aka read the code bro, it's open source
- "FIXME don't ever do this" comments all over the code base
- no update routine: download source of enterprise edition, patch your private repo, feed it in your CD/CI. I'm pretty sure vulnerabilities get patched quickly all over the world ;)
- weird design decisions like undocumented semantics for identifiers (variables, module names etc.)
- Python/JS/XML code living in the database (i.e. need the production DB to develop/test)
- performance
- addons needed for serious business use cases are not open source
- code quality of third party addons is a nightmare
Maybe this is still harmless compared to its competitors, I don't know...
Storing Python and JS.....WTF?
“Paid, supported, professional alternative to”
I mean, unless you fancy an Ops team to run your error reporting. But generally speaking, unless you have extreme privacy concerns, the economics favor SaaS subscriptions.