[HN Gopher] OpenProject - open-source project management software
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OpenProject - open-source project management software
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 108 points
Date : 2024-05-18 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openproject.org)
| otachack wrote:
| Enticing, I'm always open to trying new management tooling.
| schmidt_fifty wrote:
| The source code is here: https://github.com/opf
|
| Seems to be a rails app on top of Postgres.
| dotancohen wrote:
| It's a Redmine fork, which is a well-known Rails application.
| It's also my preferred bug tracker, far better than Jira or
| Bugzilla.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| I'm curious what the BIM addon entails?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Interesting lineage, RedMine -> ChiliProject -> OpenProject.
|
| Here is a (biased) overview on how the product compares to
| RedMine: https://www.openproject.org/blog/openproject-an-
| alternative-...
| Narretz wrote:
| It's interesting that when they forked in 2011 they switched
| from a RoR app to an SPA (angularjs then angular) + REST api to
| be able to get better UI interactivity. Now it's 2024 and after
| we've had SSR and hydration, JS frameworks are moving to even
| tighter integration between client and server (for example
| React Server components).
| TkTech wrote:
| Reading this, I had a little laugh after reading the entire
| spiel about increasing intuitivness and the first point is
| renaming issues (universally understood) to "work packages"
| (what?).
|
| Maybe it's just me :) overall it looks like quite the overhaul
| from its redmine roots. A lot of what I had to hunt for in paid
| redmine plug-ins years ago is just a core feature in
| OpenProject.
| joshvm wrote:
| "Work package" is a pretty universal term in non-software
| project management, though a single WP could contain multiple
| todo items. I'm not sure whether it was coined by one of the
| frameworks like PRINCE2, but a lot of large/governmental
| systems use it (certainly the UK/Innovate, NASA and ESA,
| etc).
|
| I would interpret "issue" as more of a general "thing that
| needs doing" whereas work package has a fairly specific
| meaning. I wouldn't want to use the phrase work packages as
| items in a bug tracker, for example.
|
| See:
|
| - https://prince2.wiki/management-products/work-package/ -
| https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/nasa-work-
| br... (pdf)
| TkTech wrote:
| TIL, thanks for the informative reply.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > A lot of what I had to hunt for in paid redmine plug-ins
| years ago is just a core feature in OpenProject.
|
| As a Redmine admin, I would love to know which plugins that
| you use, which are core OpenProject features. Thanks.
| dan-allen wrote:
| Project management actually seems like a good candidate for open-
| source. It seems like companies often need customizations. I
| could imagine forks for different industries.
| j45 wrote:
| OpenProject is generally open source. Some key features exist
| outside of the open source license.
|
| Their hosted options though, seem reasonably priced.
| input_sh wrote:
| I think every open source projects that has ever aimed to
| have >10 employees has taken that same route at some point:
| GitLab, Matomo, WordPress, Redis, MySQL, nginx, HAProxy...
| all incredibly useful for in _most_ use cases completely
| free, but if you try to _really_ rely on them (on a large
| enough scale), you will hit that paywall at some point and
| feel forced to pay up.
|
| If the goal is to have <10 employees working on an open
| source project, then I think it's a completely different
| story, offering just cloud hosting with no extra features is
| within the realm of possibility. Keep in mind that while one
| sysadmin is not cheap, a company relying on multiple cloud-
| hosted open source tools will at some point find that one
| sysadmin very cheap in comparison. He'll even have time to do
| some other things as well. That might be a completely viable
| route for some "simple" open source project (Plausible and
| SeaTable immediately come to mind), but some open source
| projects are just aiming to be complex enough to need more
| than 10 people.
|
| In summary, I personally believe everyone should be pragmatic
| enough to be fine with the "open core" model. Otherwise,
| there's no chance in hell we'd have so many cool, open
| sourced (to an extent), self-hosted tools at our disposal.
| j45 wrote:
| Every is pretty broad.
|
| The pragmatism of self-hosting is key parts of the software
| will be missing and you may not get a comparable
| experience.
|
| The issue is not charging. The issue is where key, and
| actually core, functionality is sitting on the paid side.
| The idea that "at some point" you hit a paywall is
| generally not true. It can border on crippleware, and might
| as well be shareware (still great to support small
| development teams).
|
| Evolving licensing and revenue generation is key.
|
| The reality is we wouldn't have the world we have today
| without open-source software, as in the totally free kind,
| and at some point it does need to be maintained, unless
| some of the few packages reach some sort of maturity.
|
| Your point about sysadmins not being cheap is fair. I would
| offer a counter-balance and ask how many more things than
| need to be are made to be far more complex than they need
| to be. After all, open-source is also a place of learning,
| experimentation, and breakthrough, and technical debt.
|
| Still, other projects get so much done with so little
| support. Restricted core features pretty much tunes out a
| lot of users to get over the value inertia. It's hard to
| call it open-source, when it's not quite open source
| anymore.
|
| One license I've seen is requiring companies over a certain
| revenue or headcount to have to license. Even JIRA had some
| of it figured out with their lowest license offering, but
| for a ton of functionality)
|
| AGPL is helping with some of this - the more projects
| evolve to partner (for example if someone wants to license
| the tech to be part of an unrelated project)
|
| Maybe the product managers should be the development team.
|
| It's far easier to financially support fully open source
| software even though it might not happen as much as it
| should. I've recently come across an excellent loom
| alternative in Screenity and the developer only has a few
| sponsors.
|
| Packaging open source for supporting the development of the
| software can come in many forms.
| input_sh wrote:
| > It's far easier to financially support fully open
| source software even though it might not happen as much
| as it should.
|
| Sorry for nitpicking, but this is the only thing you've
| said that I actually disagree with.
|
| It is a hell of a fight to convince a company (or even
| worse, a non-profit) to pay for something that they could
| get for $0 by self-hosting. Symbolic, one-time gestures
| are possible to fight for, but a reocurring, significant
| amount is just not. If your open source project offers
| anything back in return for payment, it's a much easier
| sell to make. It doesn't have to be complicated or
| introduce a lot of overhead, it just has to be
| _something_ , even it's like a very rarely relied on line
| of support or a logo on the homepage. Same goes for
| premium features, you just have to strike that right
| balance, which I believe we both fully agree on. Your
| tool has to be useful as a free, standalone product, at
| least up to a certain scale. I have my grudges about
| where that line gets drawn sometimes, but I can't hold a
| grudge about the exististence of such a line. It doesn't
| stop me from testing out your product.
|
| It is of course a shame that we don't have to go through
| any of this for any fully proprietary product. It is what
| it is, it's just a question of whether it's worth the
| per-user price. There are tons of companies out there
| that have used an open source product for years, never
| paid a single dime, and then switched to a proprietary,
| very expensive solution.
|
| There's also a lot of us disgruntled sysadmin/DevOps/SRE
| people along the way, but our powers are limited. Make it
| a little bit easier for us by charging for something we
| can't otherwise get from your free version. It's mutually
| beneficial for everyone involved: we do our best to give
| you some money (in return for something), sometimes we're
| succesful, and then that success usually contributes back
| to the fully open sourced version being better in some
| ways.
|
| Individual donations are fine, I do them as well (less
| consistently than I'd like to; far from nothing), but
| convincing just one single company to pay up beats the
| hell out of 100 individuals. It's a fixed, agreed upon
| sum, usually guaranteed for a period of time by some type
| of a contract. There's also only one processing fee
| involved. It is always gonna be difficult to find that
| first one, but if you pull it off, the odds of your open
| source project "succeeding" (however you define success)
| increases dramatically.
| benrutter wrote:
| I agree with your main point, but I can't resist pointing
| out some huge exceptions since there are some mammoth fully
| open projects like:
|
| - The linux kernel
|
| - Languages (Rust, Python)
|
| - Airflow
|
| - Libre Office
|
| Either way, I think the important thing is knowing why you
| want something to be open source (do you want to self host?
| Own your data? Fix bugs? Do you have doubts that the
| developing company will last long?) Some of those will work
| great with an open core model, others won't. I think if
| Linux was "open core" it wouldn't get used at all, that's a
| lot less true of something like libre office.
| input_sh wrote:
| All completely valid counter-arguments. In my defence my
| perspective is very narrow towards only _self-hostable_
| open source tools. Like the types you might wanna self-
| host in a company anywhere between 10 and 200 employees.
| I don 't have any knowledge of, say, open source
| libraries and how they operate, and the same applies to
| all of the exceptions you've listed except LibreOffice.
|
| To be even more specific: I was responsible for
| maintaining three OpenProject installations in three
| completely different places. One is a small non-profit
| that couldn't realistically afford anything else, one is
| a cheap and very poorly-managed for-profit company, and
| one is a much larger non-profit that ultimately ended up
| paying for some "better" proprietary solution. The only
| things I could think of that those three places have in
| common are: I worked there, and OpenProject was used to
| some extent, even if only briefly. And it was never
| because of me! Other people have made that decision, but
| it was my responsibility to maintain it.
|
| That's why I'm so opinionated in this thread.
| SahAssar wrote:
| There are clearly examples of fully open open-source with
| more than 10 people working on them, like linux,
| postgresql, etc.
| barfbagginus wrote:
| I think you sell short the promise of true open source,
| which gives us much more than what open core can offer, in
| a more sustainable way. I find it endearing that you in
| effect attack purists for not being thankful for unusable
| crapheaps like gitlab. Let's admit those projects were all
| relevant a decade ago , but have all become very stagnant
| and painful to use our maintain because of their open core
| fragmentation and technical debt in the open product. I
| know they have been replaced in my own usage and orgs.
|
| Imagine if Linux was Open Core, and we were supposed to be
| thankful for even that, and pay the Linux foundation for
| Linux Pro if we needed a commercial grade kernel. That'd be
| like having to buy AT&T Unix again, right? There would be a
| fork in order, right? Too much has been sacrificed to
| accept a partly non free kernel.
|
| But suddenly this idea comes along that the project needs
| to support a company on its back. And suddenly the company
| only cares about delivering the bare minimum open source
| than is necessary to annoy clients into the Enterprise
| version. The open product chokes, and a real open
| competitor appears. We migrate from gitlab to gitea, from
| MySQL to MariaDB, from redis to valkey, and so on.
|
| Open source is more important than your or my company. If
| either open source or our company has to die, it's far
| better to elect for our company to die, rather than
| threaten open source. Likewise, any company that threatens
| open source with the open core model will eventually fail
| or fall behind genuine open source competitors.
|
| If you build a company on open source, why not let it be
| fully free, selling services, support, and consulting? I
| think the days of Open-Washing via Open Core are coming to
| an end. The last 15 years have seen it betray so many
| previously lively communities. I strongly believe that in
| the future, open projects will have to be fully open to
| merit credit, or the community will immediately recognize
| them as bad actors, and standardize on a truly open
| alternative.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| The devil in such case is in details. Is Open Source version
| actually useful or is it really there just for marketing
| purpose ? I think this is where how large portion of users
| are running free vs paid version is a good indication.
| j45 wrote:
| It's probably worth first thinking about your first year of
| interaction with Open Source, and if the world might have
| been different before you first experienced it.
|
| Of course there's projects in open source where it's only
| free if your time is worthless. This means lots of manual
| figuring it out as some sort of badge of accomplishment,
| intentional, or not.
|
| Then you move towards more user friendly software, and more
| and more towards easy to install.
|
| There is a type of open source that is a funded startup,
| where open source is used as a way to attract paying
| customers, and not really be originating as open source.
| There's been lots about this out there.
|
| The devil is pretty simple to see. if a new project reaches
| the point of adoption and quickly moves or puts core
| features into a paid tier, it was meant to use free
| community attention and labour and not give back more
| labour. At this point a lot of meaningful forks can occur.
|
| Free vs paid open source is the major difference that I'm
| speaking from. There was a time, not too long ago where
| this wasn't the norm. I agree large corporations should pay
| for and support open source, because with out it much of
| what we have and use today wouldn't be as possible, as
| quickly.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I typically prefer the simplicity of GitHub issues, mixed with
| Markdown documentation in the source tree. What are some
| advantages of using a product like OpenProject?
| j45 wrote:
| It's much better suited at project management than Github.
|
| Think of it as a higher level, more encompassing approach to
| project management that can include both the technical and non-
| technical work.
|
| You can create hierarchies of tasks, connect them, assign them,
| and they are not only for software development like GitHub.
|
| It can also tie in with Gitlab/Github
|
| It's worth watching a Youtube video or two to see if anything
| resonates than asking strangers blindly on the internet to give
| us the perfect explanation :)
| thayne wrote:
| Ability to organize issues in various ways, more powerful
| search and filtering capabilities, easier to track work done
| and plan work that needs to be done, etc.
|
| For a small project it's probably overkill, but when you need
| to manage a large number of tasks and/or a large number of
| workers (including product managers, QA, etc.) you need more
| than a simple text box with some labels.
| input_sh wrote:
| tl;dr: HR is never gonna use GitHub.
|
| Project management tools are just a necessary skill even for
| non-devs, which leaves any large enough project with only two
| options:
|
| 1. Have the devs and non-devs use completely different systems.
|
| 2. Have both use the exact same tool, even if that absolutely
| sucks for the devs.
|
| The second one is bad, the first one is worse. It by definition
| creates an unnecessary complication in the flow of information,
| requiring serious effort to overcome. That's why most of us
| have horror stories about Jira, Asana, and the likes. The
| hatred of that one particular tool we happen to be using right
| now unites us all. Whichever tool you're currently using is
| always the worst one, right until the moment you're forced into
| using a different one.
|
| So, you as an individual might want to put up with one of these
| horrible options you're already familiar with, or you might use
| something you actually enjoy. But beware: if you go down the
| more enjoyable path, you are perpetually gonna be reminded it's
| not the "real deal". GitHub can't do everything a proper tool
| can, and you're gonna miss having those "advanced" options at
| some point, even if you hate to admit that to yourself.
|
| Then again, I might just be projecting.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| You can use it for the 95% of other types of projects that are
| not software related, I'm guessing.
| onthecanposting wrote:
| Some people manage projects that aren't software at all. Git
| has little utility for construction documents, and big
| construction design projects may involve interdisciplinary
| teams of dozens of people of widely varying cost and
| availability.
| not_your_mentat wrote:
| I'm still waiting for an open-source self hostable alternative to
| Basecamp. Simple lists and hill charts. Has anyone run across
| something like this?
| simantel wrote:
| Do any of these fit the bill?
|
| Plane: https://plane.so/
|
| Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/
|
| Taiga: https://taiga.io/
|
| Redmine (which OpenProject is a fork of):
| https://www.redmine.org/
|
| Teambox: https://www.teambox.com/
|
| GitLab (more than just issues): https://about.gitlab.com/
| bebop wrote:
| I have been building this on and off for a number of years.
| Mostly focused on the document management side of things:
| https://github.com/bgroff/kala-app
| nisten wrote:
| Getting the wrong vibes from the dark patterns on this site.
|
| I click on github.. it doesn't open github... had to look in the
| comments here. I find repo here... the front end is some ancient
| angular app with 3 year old security vulnerabilities.
|
| I try to find some kind of demo of the product.. and end up in a
| sales funnel to pay 500$
|
| As a first impression this does not look like a trustworthy
| opensomething .org product, even though it's probably fine.
|
| Just my opinion
| neilv wrote:
| Agreed. In traditional terms, they're using a .org domain as a
| .com. The old rules aren't enforced, but they still hold some
| meaning.
|
| It sounds like they want to do a "community edition", so they
| could just do it from a .com, and set expectations
| appropriately.
|
| If they instead wanted to have a community-developed open
| source project, but also sell derived/layered products, they
| might set up a community governance structure and home it on
| the .org, at arm's length from their .com where they do sales
| and other company-specific stuff.
|
| (BTW, sympathy on the challenges of building a sustainable
| business on open source, especially given some of the poor
| taste we sometimes see from freeloading commercial
| competitors.)
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I had no idea TLDs had any form of "semantics".
|
| TIL dot com is apparently a "commercial" site.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| They used to.
|
| .gov for government,.edu for education, etc. Certainly I
| would not expect a purely commercial entity on a ".org"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain
|
| P.s. You're making me feel old :-)
| neilv wrote:
| Yep, earlier on, the non-country-code ones had rules about
| who could use them, and the registrar for some of those was
| expected to be a custodian.
|
| Then they seemed to focus more on making money from
| registrations, than from the custodian aspect.
|
| Then ICANN created an industry of middleperson (maybe
| because there shouldn't just be one rent-seeker, but
| competing ones), and also seemed to bless a market of
| landgrabbing squatters. (And much more recently, some
| ICANN-connected people seemed to be scheming to grab a
| popular TLD for themselves, like a PE firm.)
|
| With most of the good and even bad domain names taken by
| squatters, there was demand for all sorts of new TLDs
| (which someone was happy to middleperson).
|
| As well as the risky practice of building your company atop
| a 2-letter country code TLD, where there's a significant
| chance of a change in government policy would break a lot
| of your links, URLs embedded in software, email addresses,
| and Googlejuice. Or simply have you over a barrel with
| exorbitant renewal fees (or bribes).
|
| (Historically, some of these ccTLDs were small islands,
| where there was _one_ sysadmin person running the "ISP"
| for the island, including domain name authority, and the
| government didn't necessarily even know/understand.)
| preezer wrote:
| I think redmine is wayyyy better. Btw: Open project is a fork of
| redmine.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| This project was picked up (and forked) by Rosatom for its
| internal Jira replacement after they got cut off from Jira in
| spring of 2022. No idea how many changes they introduced, but I
| guess OpenProject should be powerful enough (or at least provide
| a powerful enough base to build upon) to handle giant projects at
| their scale. The fork is not publicly accessible, although they
| do conform to the GPL and provide the source code to their
| clients.
|
| https://habr.com/ru/companies/greenatom/articles/814589
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