[HN Gopher] Outline: Self hostable, realtime, Markdown compatibl...
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Outline: Self hostable, realtime, Markdown compatible knowledge
base
Author : msk-lywenn
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-01-16 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| It was a mess to set up the first time. It's getting better. With
| been using it for about a year and we're very happy with it.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Just curious: any features (from your point of view obviously)
| making it a better choice compared to i.e free version of
| GitLab?
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| I've never used gitlab so I can't say. We use gitea. I
| thought gitlab was some kind of github alternative, like
| gitea. It's a wiki too now?
| Uninen wrote:
| Our team quite recently switched from GitLab Wiki to (a self-
| hosted) Outline.
|
| The initial impressions were very good but after using it daily
| for a couple of months I really don't like the default theme(s)
| (dark nor bright) as the formatting options are very limited and
| the end result is less readable documents. You can probably tweak
| these things but we haven't gotten there yet.
|
| The search is great and you can set explicit "edit mode" in your
| profile settings so both reading and editong becomes clearer.
| bluish29 wrote:
| Just be careful that while it is self-hostable and the source is
| available, it is not open source [1,2]. If this is something
| important for your consideration before using it.
|
| [1] https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE
|
| [2] https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-
| requirements-...
| webstrand wrote:
| So if I understand this correctly, I have _no_ license to use
| the software until late 2027? Including installation and
| contribution instructions in the README seems deceptive, since
| neither can be done legally.
| zaroth wrote:
| I don't think that's right. You have no license to use it to
| host a commercial offering to third-parties, until the BSL
| rolls over to fully open source.
|
| But the license explicitly allows free self-hosting for your
| own company / employees.
| denysvitali wrote:
| You cannot use it in production. I'm actually curious how
| this license works for them.
|
| If they get a contribution without a CLA, then they
| themselves can hypothetically not use it in prod too?
|
| Edit: you can actually use it for your own, but you can't
| compete with their offering until the date mentioned in the
| license:
|
| > You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that you
| may not use the Licensed Work for a Document Service. A
| "Document Service" is a commercial offering that allows third
| parties (other than your employees and contractors) to access
| the functionality of the Licensed Work by creating teams and
| documents controlled by such third parties.
| webstrand wrote:
| I missed that, I guess that counts as a license. But it's
| fearfully short, even MIT is longer than that. But there's
| no grant for contributors, so you have to violate the
| copyright to make a contribution, even with a CLA (which is
| a license from the contributor to the rights-holder, not
| usually the other way round).
| GGO wrote:
| I thought it is licensed under BSL 1.1 until 2027, after that
| it will become Apache 2. You can install and use it as long
| as you don't provide commercial service with it.
| tommoor wrote:
| The license allows all use _except_ competing with the cloud
| offering - you can run in for personal use, or your company
| without issue. This style of BSL license has become fairly
| common to protect the business model that allows the software
| to remain under development.
| SahAssar wrote:
| BSL can be quite open-source-like or extremely restrictive
| depending on the additional use grant. For example this
| project seem to allow most things besides offering a hosted
| version as a SaaS, but the BSL itself disallows any
| production use and "production" as a term is not defined.
|
| I would be weary of even setting up a personal instance of
| BSL software for anything besides development or evaluation
| since it could be counted as "production".
| GGO wrote:
| is BSL frowned upon? is it a bad choice if I wanted to provide
| a service and make source code available for those who want to
| self-host for free?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Generally what's frowned upon is using phrases like "open
| source" or words like "open" and "free" to describe source-
| available licenses that are not open source per the Open
| Source Initiative definition[0] or libre (versus no-cost).
| There are lot of people (me included) who take a very
| pedantic view of these terms. Makers of proprietary software
| sometimes use these terms to unfairly exploit the goodwill
| associated with actual free/libre and open source software
| licenses.
|
| A lot of people don't regard BSL-licensed (and other source-
| available licenses) as much different than any other
| proprietary license. There will always be the people who
| object to any proprietary licenses. You'll always offend
| those people by using a proprietary license. Using precise
| and correct language with a source-available license like the
| BSL won't offend those who take open source and free software
| terminology seriously however.
|
| [0] https://opensource.org/osd/
| wredue wrote:
| Corporate bootlickers frown upon developers restricting
| corporate uses of their software.
|
| The OSI is run by corporations, for corporations, and has
| successfully run propaganda campaigns to shit on source
| available licenses purely on the basis of them not being
| bootlicker enough.
|
| No. There is absolutely nothing wrong with restricting how
| corporations can use your code. Fuck the OSI.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Some of us in "open source" are also interested in helping
| independent developers (including arrangements such as
| worker-owned cooperatives) gain access to the means of
| production they can also use to make a living from. BSL
| excludes small/independent/worker-owned orgs, not only the
| big and exploitative corporations. If everyone moves to BSL
| then only those who already have access to capital will be
| able to afford to build software on top of non-free
| foundations - a gap which widens with time and a kind of
| "pulling up the ladder behind you" practice deployed at
| scale
|
| There are other interesting licenses for this issue that
| exclude exploitative corporate use without cutting out e.g.
| worker-owned cooperative use [0] but nothing currently in
| popular use, and these may be less desirable in
| "exvestment" opportunities such as linux where corporate
| investment has vastly contributed to public goods with
| values that are not represented by those corporations own
| goals and otherwise wouldn't exist given current society
|
| [0] https://anticapitalist.software which encourages free
| reuse by for-profit (or otherwise) entities in markets, but
| excludes exploitative use. I just posted the link to
| discuss.
|
| > 2. The User is one of the following: a. An individual
| person, laboring for themselves b. A non-profit
| organization c. An educational institution d. An
| organization that seeks shared profit for all of its
| members, and allows non-members to set the cost of their
| labor
|
| > 3. If the User is an organization with owners, then all
| owners are workers and all workers are owners with equal
| equity and/or equal vote.
|
| > 4. If the User is an organization, then the User is not
| law enforcement or military, or working for or under
| either.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| What an ambiguous mess.
|
| > Change License: Apache License, Version 2.0
|
| > 1. To specify as the Change License the GPL Version 2.0 or
| any later version
|
| So which is it?
|
| > Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of
| the first publicly available distribution of a specific version
| of the Licensed Work under this License
|
| That text was was added in a commit on March 27, 2020. That
| commit also lists a change date of "2023-03-01". So when was
| the "first publicly available distribution"?
|
| ---
|
| Can we please just _stop_ wasting each other 's time with this
| nonsense? Clearly none of us is enjoying the exercise.
| yodon wrote:
| Developers laugh at lawyers who think they can write code,
| and lawyers laugh at developers who think they can write
| contracts.
|
| The truth is there are probably more lawyers who can write
| good code than developers who can write good contracts.
| crotchfire wrote:
| If you ever find an IP attorney who studied engineering as
| an undergraduate (and was good at it), hang on to them,
| they are the best. Mine saved me from a _single_ mistake
| that would 've cost more than 100x what I paid him (and
| several other less-spectacular disasters).
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The concept of a "good contract" can be argued to death. I
| don't think that argument needs to overwhelm my point: this
| is an _incoherent_ contract. It doesn 't require any
| expertise to say so.
| mroche wrote:
| Per the license itself: Additional Use Grant:
| You may make use of the Licensed Work, provided that
| you may not use the Licensed Work for a Document
| Service. A "Document
| Service" is a commercial offering that
| allows third parties (other than your employees and
| contractors) to access the functionality of the
| Licensed Work by creating teams and documents
| controlled by such third parties.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Then you come across Trilium and drop the mic
|
| [0] https://github.com/zadam/trilium
| ezst wrote:
| I just recently came back up from a deep dive through
| knowledge management systems, and Trilium is what I settled
| with. It might not look like much on the surface,
| especially compared to the bling and hype of the VC baked
| alternatives, but once the basics click (everything is a
| note, notes can have inheritable attributes, you build
| types of notes like in OOP inheriting from base notes by
| leveraging the hierarchy, instances are just notes that
| have a template relationship to the model notes and can be
| stored anywhere), it's a damn elegant and powerful tool.
|
| Definitely underrated/highly recommended!
| CrypticShift wrote:
| So this is the new generation of Javascript self-hostable wikis
| inspired by Notion. I remember in the late 2000s, most were PHP-
| based, with Twiki being an exception: it was Perl-based and also
| had a powerful wiki/database combination [1]. But it was not
| intuitive to use. That's what Notion nailed a decade later.
|
| Now All the new (OSS ?) Notion clones like Outline are still
| deficient in that second database aspect. I hope we are
| eventually getting there.
|
| [1] https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/StructuredWiki
| ezst wrote:
| Give Trilium a shot (as to why, I commented elsewhere in this
| thread in response to someone mentioning it), it's not super
| flashy at first sight, but in my experience, it gets the
| database aspect right.
| albybisy wrote:
| what are other good opensource alternatives?
| antiframe wrote:
| Your question implies that Outline is opensource. It's not. I
| reread your question as "What are good opensource
| alternatives?" and it makes sense.
| deathanatos wrote:
| My org has used mdBook: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/
| (That link is itself a rendered mdBook, so that'll give you an
| idea of the feature set.)
|
| (While it's definitely a Rust "thing", if you just have a set
| of .md files, all you need is a "SUMMARY.md" (which contains
| the ToC) and a small config file; i.e., you don't have to have
| any Rust code to use it, and it works fine without. We document
| a large, mostly non-Rust codebase with it.)
| webwanderings wrote:
| This is pretty fast. Wow. Question for you. Does the search
| feature works out of the box, or does it need a plugin?
| bityard wrote:
| It's nowhere near as featureful as Outline, but I wrote my own
| Markdown knowledge base thingy in Python. It is web-based and
| geared toward single-user (or _very_ small team use) but it's
| Apache licensed and has no commercial tie-ins. Super easy to
| deploy as long as you know how to layer some rudimentary
| authentication on top of it.
|
| https://github.com/cu/silicon
| infecto wrote:
| When I was a younger developer I thought tooling solved all
| problems. As I grew more experience I slowly changed my mind that
| some problem spaces require not only tooling but process change.
| I am firmly in the camp that you don't need yet another
| documentation tool. The problem is a human/process one,
| documentation/knowledge bases need to be part of the process. As
| long as you can search it and its easy to update/create, I don't
| think the tool is solving much for you.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Friction frustrates processes though. If working with a tool is
| constant pain, then the process is going to suffer.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| > When I was a younger developer I thought tooling solved all
| problems. As I grew more experience I slowly changed my mind
| that some problem spaces require not only tooling but process
| change.
|
| Lets take it one step further.
|
| You start out thinking everything is tooling. As you grow more
| experienced you realize that everything is process. As you grow
| more experienced still, you realize that the world is really
| messy and rarely ever anything is everything.
| infecto wrote:
| Of course the world is messy and there are many variables. I
| still sit in the camp that documentation is a human problem
| that requires both tooling and process. I wish Outline luck
| but on the documentation side, its largely a human/process
| one.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| > both tooling and process
|
| so better tooling helps then?
| maklu wrote:
| Have been using it for over 2 years now, for a team of nearly 80
| people. Love it - both self-hosted and as a service. Very quick
| to respond to issues on github, and the tool keeps evolving.
| b2bsaas00 wrote:
| Could be used to host public pages for tutorials/guides for a
| SaaS?
| tommoor wrote:
| You can yes, in fact Outline's own documentation are hosted on
| Outline:
|
| https://docs.getoutline.com/s/guide
| o_____________o wrote:
| What are the advantages over Obisidian?
|
| - Team oriented
|
| - Integrated with Slack
|
| - ?
| tommoor wrote:
| I haven't really used Obsidian, but I'd imagine that the team
| aspect is the main advantage plus realtime collaborative
| editing as part of that.
|
| Outline is also used in a lot of orgs where the users are less
| technical, I'd imagine Obsidian could be quite intimidating in
| comparison.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| What are the advantages of Figma over Illustrator?
|
| - Team oriented
| joshfee wrote:
| I just spun up a self hosted instance this past weekend, and
| while its fairly decent it doesn't seem to hit the mark compared
| to Notion (which I use at my day job). There's just a bit too
| much friction in creating pages (you need to click "publish" on
| every page you create), no /page command to quickly jump into a
| nested page, and.
|
| I'm more excited by Affine (https://affine.pro/), though their
| self hosting support seems to be neglected, and it has the same
| "not actually open source" issue as Outline.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| Very interesting! I wonder how much friction there would be in
| migrating the data from outline to affine.
|
| Have you tried affine? If you did, how is the performance?
| Something I like a lot with outline is that it's super reactive
| and fast, even on low end servers or clients. Only the startup
| time is bad.
|
| What do they mean by "neglected self host"? Is it just because
| the docker packages are not up to date? Can't we just build and
| run what's on github?
| tommoor wrote:
| Improving how drafts work is near the top of the roadmap, one
| of Outline's main value props is it's speed -so definitely want
| to reduce the friction here.
| tommoor wrote:
| Maintainer here, happy to answer questions and glad to see it get
| some attention on HN :)
|
| Outline is a bootstrapped business. The software is used by
| thousands of teams, including government agencies, universities,
| and companies from startups to large corporates.
| b2bsaas00 wrote:
| Does it support video uploading with native html video tag?
| (Cloud version)
| tommoor wrote:
| Yep, cloud and self-hosted both support embedding video
| (native tag) as of a few versions ago.
| kkfx wrote:
| After years of a personal PIM (in org-mode and experiments with
| DokuWiki) I've concluded that to manage notes we do need some
| kind of structure, a free graph will became unmanageable after a
| certain quantity of notes. That structure is simply a chronology,
| since the flow of time is a thing common to pretty anything.
|
| My actual setup is:
|
| - daily notes, meaning when I want to write something I'll put in
| today note, no thinking about where to archive, under a common
| year root, with a monthly recap;
|
| - binders notes, who transclude or link single notes inside a
| daily one (headings in org-mode lingo) assembling and arranging
| them as I wish, under a "live archive" root;
|
| - not current anymore binders under a "dead archive" root.
|
| Such structure so far allow me to store and retrieve pretty
| anything and always find and consolidate things, something I
| can't do with ZK, LYT, PARA and other common techniques.
|
| That's to simply say a thing: we do not need the nth wiki style
| slick UI app but something that offer:
|
| - live rendering, like org-mode or even Zim, no separation
| between source form and rendered form, because that's makes easy
| write and edit things;
|
| - transclusion (TiddlyWiki, Dokuwiki+Include plugin (a bit
| limited), BookStack, org-transclude albeit a bit slow and
| limited) because to create our library of babel (cfr. Conrad
| Gessner ~1545 but also many others) we must been able to take
| atomic notes AND COMPOSE THEM in various ways;
|
| - attachment support (a decent one, org-attach it's ok, but only
| because it's bare simple so it's easy to hijack, Paperless it's
| damn slow but flexible enough and so on);
|
| - ability to INTEGRATE anything. In this regard ALL modern
| software can't win, simply because modern systems are designed
| for commercial reasons, not like classic ones where the OS was a
| single user-programmable application, and an application is just
| code added to the OS. The web try to recover DocUIs and
| composability but it's really limited. We can let's say link
| GMail threads in notes, but it's far from link a notmuch-accessed
| local mail linked in org-mode;
|
| - offering by default a chronology, even Zim offer that to a
| certain extent with the builtin calendar.
|
| Without the above just write some new and uncertain project fully
| knowing that migrating contents is far from being easy or granted
| and it's a very painful thing, is IMVHO a waste of time...
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