[HN Gopher] Docs - Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
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Docs - Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
Author : maelito
Score : 1792 points
Date : 2025-03-16 11:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ykonstant wrote:
| It would be fascinating if it could add LaTeX support!
| yorwba wrote:
| It seems vaguely planned:
| https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/issues/724
| tommoor wrote:
| Outline has LaTeX fwiw, and is BSL licensed - so you can host
| it yourself without issue.
|
| https://github.com/outline/outline
| mgkimsal wrote:
| The closest we get is something like USDS, which then gets
| hijacked in to DOGE.
|
| Open source software built and supported by a national government
| is inspiring. Are there more examples of this I'm not aware of? I
| hope so.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| The UK has Government Digital Services (GDS), which has built
| and open sourced all the good bits of gov.uk:
| https://github.com/alphagov
| danieldk wrote:
| Open source repositories of the Dutch government:
|
| https://oss.developer.overheid.nl/repositories
| dopidopHN wrote:
| It's been happening pretty consistently in France.
|
| The cops are rolling their own distro :)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
|
| I think it's wise. Not idea if it's good
| crimsoneer wrote:
| I have a scraper that covers open source govtech I keep meaning
| to tidy up...
|
| https://govtech-report.cloud/
| pcwalton wrote:
| Ghidra is a fine example from the US government.
| dzonga wrote:
| there was 18f too :(
| nchagnet wrote:
| 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.
| johndhi wrote:
| I haven't thought about this a ton - but am I wrong that it
| sounds crazy and inefficient for the government to essentially
| compete with private industry?
|
| It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization that
| doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government launched a
| messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it drew users away
| from WhatsApp and it had better encryption ... Would that
| actually be better for the economy of this country? Something
| seems off about it to me.
| maelito wrote:
| > if the government launched a messaging app competitive with
| WhatsApp
|
| Done, but for public workers. https://tchap.beta.gouv.fr
|
| These tools are not yet for citizens, but for workers.
| lloeki wrote:
| Tchap is based on Matrix for those who wonder and can't
| read french
| armarr wrote:
| Being dependent on foreign companies is a security issue. The
| economic value is more subtle and indirect but it is there
| AJ007 wrote:
| It's also not a reliable source of funding as some European
| open source projects have learned.
| weakfish wrote:
| Can you provide a source / examples?
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| Things like this aren't about economic growth, they're about
| reducing the reliance on foreign services
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I don't think in this case they're really trying to compete -
| they just need something better than any of the open source
| solutions available and are then open sourcing that. I doubt
| they're going to get into the business of hosting public
| instances or marketing to businesses.
|
| It wouldn't make sense to rely on a foreign closed source
| company if they want to do anything serious with this IMO.
| emacsen wrote:
| There's so much here to discuss that we could only ever touch
| on the surface level, but let's give it a go.
|
| Let's first start with what I understand to be the premise-
| that private industry and governments are two worlds (ie your
| worlds colliding idea). Let's explore this from the other
| side: Private industry should never compete with the
| government.
|
| We don't need bottled water- tap is fine, and it competes
| with government water.
|
| Commercial radio and TV stations should not exist in
| countries that have a public station.
|
| Doctors and nurses should never work in private clinics where
| government offers medical services, or supplementary
| insurance should not exist.
|
| Back to government, though. Government should do what's best
| for the citizenry. It might make a public bridge to compete
| with a commercial ferry service. Or it might mean offering
| cheap Internet to compete with exploitive ISPs.
|
| Proprietary software like this is an effective tax on the
| citizens, but a commercial one. Governments can fund a public
| alternative for a small amount of money. Why not?
| bayindirh wrote:
| No, it doesn't.
|
| First, you create the tools you need with the money your
| people give you. Then, you give back the tools you created to
| the public and/or everyone who needs them.
|
| You keep your data in your own data center, use the tools
| which squarely fills the needs of your workers and people,
| and you share its maintenance with the outside users.
|
| It's a win-win-win (country, its workers, people in the
| world). WWW is developed the same way, Europe's open data
| repository Zenodo (https://zenodo.org) is built the same way,
| alongside countless science tools.
|
| We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things.
| Heck, most if not all supercomputer centers in the US and
| around the world are government funded, and free for
| scientists.
|
| Moreover, the project is licensed MIT to enable to be "taken
| and ran with it" by private sector. From the README.md:
|
| > While Docs is a public driven initiative our licence (sic)
| choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use,
| sell and contribute to the project.
| phillc73 wrote:
| Why "licence (sic)"? It's the correct spelling.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I know it's the correct spelling for UK English, but US
| uses license. I just wanted to make sure that I copied it
| verbatim, that's all.
| virdev wrote:
| > We shouldn't be afraid of governments doing cool things
|
| Yes! And you'd be surprised by the kind of talent we're
| able to attract. People want cool stuff to be built by the
| public. After all its also their money that's being spent.
| But you need to provide the right environment for their
| talent not to go waste and thats not easy.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > And you'd be surprised by the kind of talent we're able
| to attract.
|
| I know. I work with some of them at a national
| HPC/Supercomputer center.
|
| The environment is super important, too. You're spot on
| at that regard.
| rtpg wrote:
| In a universe where the French government drops a perfect
| replacement for Notion and causes Notion to go out of
| business, this is still a net positive for society in the
| same way that things like Linux existing is a net positive
| for society.
|
| One should not focus on the economic sphere as the be all and
| end all. We can just have improvements be distributed to
| everyone sometimes! We can just do good things through
| coordinated efforts and entirely sidestep the economy to get
| the good things.
|
| All the people who were working on Notion now can go get some
| on the job training to learn to farm.
|
| Why don't we just do this for everything? You can go read a
| bunch of political and economic philosophy about that.
| jdvh wrote:
| In the short term a free open source govt alternative may
| be a net positive for society. I don't think it is in the
| long run. Government projects like these are not likely to
| really push the state-of-the-art forward. This project even
| advertises itself as a FOSS Notion alternative. Do
| government-sponsored clones encourage or stymie innovation?
| I think the latter.
|
| Every week we read in the news that the EU struggles with
| entrepreneurship. That our tech industry is languishing.
| That the EU gets out-competed by the US on software and by
| China on everything else. Europe should be making industry-
| leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that
| make products that get used worldwide. EU subsidized clones
| of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
|
| I'm obviously biased because I'm also working on a product
| in this space. But if Notion developers must become farmers
| because innovation no longer pays that is a loss to the
| world in my book.
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe
| should produce software startups that make products that
| get used worldwide._
|
| I've kind of lost hope when it comes to commercial
| services and proprietary apps. They're sadly all sooner
| or later enshittified. We need something different, not
| by promises but by design (FOSS).
|
| _> EU subsidized clones of popular American products
| feels like admitting defeat._
|
| I think it's a fresh and needed take on the financing of
| our common digital infra.
| jdvh wrote:
| I think the main problem is lock-in. If you can't get
| your data out you can't leave. This is true for open
| source and for commercial products alike.
|
| If you own your data and if you have the option to self-
| host you can always opt out of updates you don't like.
| bluedino wrote:
| I can't think of too many apps that I use that are truly
| FOSS.
|
| Databases, compilers/interpreters, web servers, operating
| systems...but apps? (Other than gnu/bad command line
| tools of course)
| zellyn wrote:
| For me: Emacs, NetNewsWire, Gimp, Inkscape, Calibre,
| Firefox, Chrome, occasionally VS Code, very occasionally
| whatever Audacity is called today.
|
| And I'm a Mac user!
| rglullis wrote:
| To add to your list: Atril (PDF Viewer), Vokoscreen
| (Screen recorder), Transmission (Torrent CLient), Simple
| Scan (Scanner Tool), LibreOffice, Keepassxc, Thunderbird,
| Element Desktop, Dino, Handbrake, Beets (Music Collection
| Tagger/Manager), VLC, Kodi, Rhythmbox (Music Player),
| Syncthing
|
| If I look at my phone, it's possible that I have more
| apps installed via F-Droid than through Google Play
| thelaxiankey wrote:
| Typically a FOSS community seems to take a while to get
| started, but once it gets going (Blender, Linux, etc) it
| tends to stick around and even seriously gain traction.
| Xelbair wrote:
| >government projects like these are not likely to really
| push the state-of-the-art forward.
|
| why it would need to be state of the art? it needs to be
| stable and 'good enough'. This isn't rocket science, nor
| quantum mechanics - this is literally a glorified CRUD
| app that focuses on documentation.
| jdvh wrote:
| Because when innovative software isn't made inside the EU
| then Europeans will simply use the best products made
| elsewhere.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| As of 2025 any US-based services are persona non grata
| for national security reasons. Which other nation's
| services could the EU switch to that isn't from US?
| rglullis wrote:
| Your whole argument is based on neomania: progress is
| always good and there is no point in working on something
| unless it advances the state of the art.
| jdvh wrote:
| Certainly not. I don't believe progress is always good.
| But subsidies should be reserved for ambitious projects
| that push the state of the art forward. For those
| projects that realistically will not get funded
| commercially. CERN, for instance.
| rglullis wrote:
| How is that a subsidy?
|
| They are putting their resources into the development of
| a product that can be universally shared and used. There
| is no favored party.
|
| Also, I completely disagree with the "ambitious
| projects". I actually would favor the government let all
| the risky ventures to private enterprises and focused
| _only_ on tried-and-true developments and make them
| universally available to its citizens.
| panarky wrote:
| Building this allows them to reduce the subsidy that is
| perpetual software license fees.
| jdvh wrote:
| In exchange for perpetual development and maintenance
| costs. Total cost of ownership doesn't go down by rolling
| your own in-house.
| rglullis wrote:
| Having a FOSS alternative allows you to _share_ the R &D
| costs with other interested parties.
|
| _At the very least_ , it works as a bargaining chip when
| it comes to negotiating contracts with the private
| sector.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| If that's true in a large organization, how do SaaS
| companies actually make a profit?
|
| If you develop an in-house tool, you have very
| predictable user numbers so you can go on-prem versus
| cloud for the compute and save ~10x on that side.
|
| You also have the benefit of being second, the other guys
| already did the hard work of UX research etc. and your
| in-house team just needs to replicate a slightly
| complicated CRUD app.
|
| The one significant roadblock I can see is being able to
| put together the right team for the job. But cost-wise it
| has to be a no-brainer that in-house is cheaper.
| sham1 wrote:
| What part of this project would stop you or someone else
| from "innovating" and making it "state of the art"?
|
| After all, it's licensed under the MIT License, and the
| readme explicitly states that it can be contributed to,
| and that in fact they encourage it.
| virdev wrote:
| Maybe you are not building something in the sector but do
| you have any idea of how shitty collaborative work is for
| public agents ?
|
| The possibility of data being sifoned back to the US if
| they use american cloud services has millions of public
| agents not being able to collaborate online.
|
| Some of them try to provide on premise versions of the
| software but Microsoft want you so bad to pay for 365 or
| teams that they are willing to maintain only super old
| versions.
|
| I spoke with a guy reponsible for 100k public agents who
| told me his only choice is to host Sharepoint 2011 (in
| 2025 !)
|
| So maybe Docs is not as innovative as Notion but hey, we
| need as efficient as we can public servants. And we will
| do that by providing modern tools they can use online
| with their colleagues.
|
| + When we think of Microsoft we think about the Office
| Suite but in lot of cases they do the authentication with
| Active Directory. Go luck doing interoperability or SSO
| accross agencies when all of them rely on closed source
| code and are locked in by vendors...
|
| We're actually solving with OIDC identity federation
| called ProConnect.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Government projects like these are not likely to really
| push the state-of-the-art forward.
|
| Well, if a government project can easily push you out,
| then you're not really a state-of-the-art.
|
| > EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels
| like admitting defeat.
|
| Governments need to think long-term. And one danger of
| relying on something like Notion is vendor lock-in. You
| can't easily migrate your data out of Notion, with all
| the rich content preserved (edit history, text comments,
| etc.)
|
| EU can try to mandate a common interoperability standard,
| but it takes years and the end result always ends up
| being behind the state of the art.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Government projects today, you mean.
|
| The government could act like an immortal mega corp if it
| had the authority to do so. Such as pushing out
| competition via loss leaders. And as a bonus, with the
| government, every program can be a loss leader.
|
| The funding potential for this pattern is constrained
| today, which is why government projects that compete with
| private industry are generally terrible. But, clearly,
| the money is there to be captured by this segment out of
| government funding generally, if the government is
| allowed to enter business directly.
|
| The solid argument I see against allowing such actions is
| a slippery slope towards the above. Slippery slope
| arguments aren't always correct, of course, but they
| aren't always wrong either; they just point out a risk.
| Depending on one's risk tolerance, it is wise to avoid
| slippery slopes when you can't quantify just how steep it
| is.
| rtpg wrote:
| There are plenty of projects pushing the state of the art
| forward.
|
| A very specific example: basically all interactive
| theorem proving tooling is built in public research
| halls. This has allowed Compcert, a C compiler with "no
| bugs"[0] to exist.
|
| The Compcert case is interesting because private funding
| is also involved. Public state research can still pull in
| private funds! We are not entirely throwing in the towel!
|
| [0] "no bugs" here means "we have defined a spec for C,
| and this compiler is guaranteed to compile your C code
| along the spec we defined, so long as your program
| terminates". There's some hand waving around a theorem
| prover's own validity but all Compcert bugs have been "we
| misewrote a chunk of spec" varietals
| slevis wrote:
| > All the people who were working on Notion now can go get
| some on the job training to learn to farm.
|
| This would only work if the government replacement would be
| more efficient than Notion (in the sense that the French
| government employs less people for a product of the same
| quality).
| rtpg wrote:
| This one felt obvious, but it feels a bit hard to reason
| on.
|
| How many sales people does this project need? It's not
| zero because grants etc but let's not kid ourselves.
|
| I think this project will never spend as much money as
| notion on devs. Like ever.
|
| I will grant that there's a good idea around "well notion
| was doing operations for everyone at once so people don't
| need as many tech/ops people ". I'm hopeful that hosted
| variants pop up to help with this. I'm also hopeful that
| we can figure out how to make stuff easier to host when
| high availability is not a requirement.
|
| So maybe we end up net more operators, and less sales
| people and devs. That's kind of interesting!
| slevis wrote:
| If it feels hard to reason on, it might be a hint...
| Sales people provide value. Maybe a sales person would
| have told this project to focus on being an alternative
| to Notion or Google Docs, as they are different apps/use
| cases.
|
| The only reason why they might need less developers is
| because they are a copying an existing product, so less
| R&D. There is no reason to assume that the teams behind
| Notion, Outline, Google Docs ... are less effective than
| the French Government.
| Lutger wrote:
| Agree, but rather than farming, I think it will enable
| developers to focus on more complex and interesting
| problems. Or spot a need in the market (doesn't have to be
| complex) and quickly solve new problems people are willing
| to pay money for.
|
| Outcompeting only works if a software company is truly
| unable to pivot or outperform open source tools sponsored
| by the government.
|
| The same thing can be said by free tools given away by big
| tech, like vscode. Here, microsoft operates actually quite
| similar to the government. There is no way a new company
| can create a competitor to vscode and charge money for it
| anymore. This pushes people to solve other software
| problems, rather than doing something else entirely. I
| don't think we'll be at the limit of economic value we can
| generate by writing new software just yet, if such a thing
| even exists.
| nchagnet wrote:
| I get your point, and I agree to some extent, but I also
| don't think it has to be black and white. I don't really
| trust the French government to fund such projects long-term,
| but at the same time private companies create and end
| services all the time (looking at you Google). So within
| those parameters, this doesn't seem like a bad thing.
|
| And regarding the economy, my understanding is that there's
| been a push in the French government (and in Europe to some
| extent) towards more independent services (the recent
| behaviour of US big tech are not helping for sure). If the
| government is going to generate some tool for its internal
| use, I sure would prefer if they open sourced it at the same
| time.
|
| Finally for the WhatsApp alternative, if France or Germany or
| whoever else started an open source WhatsApp competitor with
| better encryption, I definitely think it would be good for
| European citizens: one less dependency on Meta. Why wouldn't
| we want that?
| ryanSrich wrote:
| It's insane yes. What an incredible waste of tax dollars.
| nchagnet wrote:
| Thankfully it's tax euros!
| rvense wrote:
| When your health sector is being shaken down by foreign
| monopoly for software licenses whose prices increase for no
| reason, making your own word processor suddenly doesn't
| seem very different to training your own doctors.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| They could try innovating and actually supporting an
| economy of entrepreneurship so individuals are
| incentivized to build better tools in their home country
| instead of coming here. Too bad VC _almost_ exclusively
| exists in the US. What Europe calls VC is a joke.
| rvense wrote:
| The world would be much better without much of what
| American venture capital has created over the past twenty
| years. Ad tech mass surveillance, Uber eating labour
| protections, "Unicorn" worshpping monopolization of basic
| utilities.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Would much rather have the hell world American VC has
| created than the alternative hell world of the euro uber-
| government.
| rvense wrote:
| Can you give me some concrete examples of where Euro
| uber-government is negatively impacting my life?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >It feels like a colliding of worlds and a cannibalization
| that doesn't make sense to me. Like - if the government
| launched a messaging app competitive with WhatsApp and it
| drew users away from WhatsApp and it had better encryption
| ... Would that actually be better for the economy of this
| country? Something seems off about it to me.
|
| The economy works best when anyone does what is supposed to:
| the Government sticks to maintaining order, defending the
| country, public healthcare, public education. The companies
| are producing goods and services.
|
| Governments trying to undercut businesses isn't doing any
| good to the economy. There will be less money, less jobs.
| rfrey wrote:
| Many Americans think public healthcare competes with
| private hospitals and insurance companies. A criticism of
| public education in the beginning was that it would put
| (private) schools out of business. All we're talking about
| here is where the line is.
| nchagnet wrote:
| This argument could be made for healthcare, postal
| services, and even emergency services. Thankfully in Europe
| we don't agree with that view. Entrepreneurship is an
| important engine for innovation, but it doesn't mean our
| collective representation cannot fund projects which serve
| the whole community if we see fit.
| rvense wrote:
| Are they undercutting businesses or creating new ones?
| Running and supporting an instance of a suite of open
| source tools can be a business.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| Your example of WhatsApp is a perfect one for me to say: yes,
| I would much rather use for my private messaging an open
| source, publicly founded solution, than a solution which Mark
| Zuckerberg controls for his own private gain.
| sMarsIntruder wrote:
| You're right. That's economically inefficient, but apparently
| seems to be the only way to create models that compete with
| the bigs. IMHO this repo will die within few years, and
| that's both a pity and a waste of public money.
| sMarsIntruder wrote:
| Guys, pls say that government-funded open source projects
| are fine, otherwise prepare to get downvoted just because
| it is.
| ezst wrote:
| It may or may not die within few years (I'm placing my bets
| on the optimistic side), if it delivers value today, and
| the alternative is a cost prohibitive walled garden
| unsuitable for sensitive data, then it's well worth it cost
| in public money already.
| virdev wrote:
| Do you any idea of how much collaborative suites cost to
| government every year? 10's if not 100's of millions! They
| have millions of public servents. The investement to build
| Docs is a drop of water in the the ocean in comparison.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Private industry can always build on open source as well. The
| just work on the parts that don't involve reinventing the
| wheel.
| afavour wrote:
| IMO there are a few interesting things to unpack here. Going
| to put your WhatsApp comparison aside because I don't think
| it's actually applicable.
|
| When it comes to software these governments are already
| shelling out X amount of money (which they don't with
| WhatsApp, hence putting it aside). If they can make a
| comparable product they themselves own with X * 0.5 money
| it's a clear win. Even if it's X * 1.5 money to begin with
| while they create the software then decreasing over time as
| the software stabilises it's still a win.
|
| There's an additional economic factor as well. For any
| country that isn't the US licensing off the shelf software
| means transferring money directly to the US economy. Creating
| your own homegrown version keeps that money in your country,
| paying for employees that will themselves contribute to the
| economy. Without making the thread overtly political, this is
| something a lot of countries are thinking about more and more
| recently.
| diggan wrote:
| > if the government launched a messaging app competitive with
| WhatsApp and it drew users away from WhatsApp and it had
| better encryption ... Would that actually be better for the
| economy of this country? Something seems off about it to me.
|
| I'm curious to know why that seems off. If you're a "free
| market" proponent, you usually are because you want people to
| have access to "the best", as that's what competition is
| supposed to bring out.
|
| And if a government manages to come up with a better Whatsapp
| (whatever that means), and users starts to change, then
| clearly the alternative is better, as proven by users moving
| over, so then even someone who wants free markets would
| believe that this is a good outcome, if I understand things
| correctly.
|
| But instead it sounds crazy to you, it seems. It would be
| interesting to hear more about why you feel this is crazy. To
| me it sounds like a good idea for users, which I guess is
| what I care more about.
| addicted wrote:
| > am I wrong that it sounds crazy and inefficient for the
| government to essentially compete with private industry?
|
| The Internet is a strong and definitive counterpoint to this
| claim, IMO.
|
| If the government didn't create the open internet, we would
| all be living in AOL style walled gardens right now.
| sitkack wrote:
| For many on facebook, this is indeed the case. FB is just
| AOL for GenX and Boomers.
| fastasucan wrote:
| 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?
| jahewson wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Government can and does tax its workers and suppliers.
|
| In a bubble, there is no revenue raising difference
| between a government owned economy and a private economy
| with equal production.
|
| Realistic differences come down to comparative
| disfunction of management (IMO, best considered in terms
| of which is worse).
| sitkack wrote:
| The government isn't in the business of consuming tax
| revenue. Its mission is to most efficiently serve the
| needs of its constituents.
|
| Government services help everyone and raise the floor of
| the standard of living. Someone is now free to go write
| and do SOMETHING else and sell that.
|
| By your logic, we should get rid of libraries since more
| economic activity would happen if everyone had to buy
| their own books.
| theflash666 wrote:
| From my understanding, most European governments purchase
| American or other foreign-owned software, which often
| does not contribute to tax revenues in the countries
| where it is used.
| theflash666 wrote:
| Actually, open-source product and code can totally be
| deployed or reused by private actors to make money of it
| rvense wrote:
| Software licenses are certainly a major expense for all
| levels of the Danish government. (Cloud infrastructure,
| too, increasingly.)
|
| They've started complaining, especially since prices have
| been going up, but while there's rumbling underground,
| we've yet to see any real movement away from Microsoft.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > Where do governments get their money from? Taxes on
| economic activity.
|
| That may be true of local/state governments, but it isn't
| true for currency-issuing governments like the US. I'm
| not as familiar with the EU monetary system as I haven't
| read as much into it.
| wvh wrote:
| There is this thing called balance. The middle road. Yin
| Yang. Entities keeping each other in check.
| blitzar wrote:
| The big tech billionaires got there by taking the same money
| from the government and keeping the ownership. If the
| government money keeps the ownership in the hands of "we the
| people" then that sounds good to me.
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| I think this is quite right. The government should get out of
| the business of building roads and giving them away for free.
|
| If they were privately owned, they would be priced
| appropriately and we would not have all the problems with
| traffic congestion.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| Is this a parody comment? Hard to tell on this website to
| be honest.
| Lutger wrote:
| It doesn't need to compete, not really. There are many bodies
| of government. National governments, local, state wide, and
| from many different countries. These all need software, often
| doing more or less the same. If they would pool their
| resources to pay development of useful software,
| theoretically it could overcome a tragedy of the commons and
| create really useful software cheaply. This increases
| productivity and thus economic growth.
|
| It may compete with private software for a while, but not
| that much: companies will find a way to add value to existing
| open source software or create new propositions. Building out
| the boring and useful foundational stuff collectively will
| just move the bar on what is exciting and new software, or
| what are better takes on existing software. Companies will be
| creatively seeking out ever more complex problems to tackle
| once the government builds out the basic tooling.
|
| And ideally, that is what private companies should be good
| at: quick to pivot, creative and innovative problem-solving.
|
| Of course, that requires governments to play nice and enable
| companies to leverage their tooling too, and - perhaps a
| bigger problem - take responsibility for competent governance
| of the most important projects and manage their adoption
| well.
| nrjames wrote:
| Vendor lock-in is risky and expensive for large corporations
| and governments, both of which tend to move slowly. I find it
| completely legitimate that a government would create a tool
| that's useful to its workforce and helps to avoid vendor lock-
| in. Insomuch as it's created by the government, it's released
| as open source.
|
| Most companies and people aren't going to want to maintain the
| VMs and/or infrastructure to run their own platforms, so they
| have the option to continue using SaaS offerings like Notion.
| KronisLV wrote:
| 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
| development of open alternatives (even if done with some
| comparatively small amount of taxes) seems like a good idea, as
| long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent.
|
| For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments
| that could fund helping the development of LibreOffice, then
| suddenly _even_ if someone wants to use MS Office, that 's
| still a bargaining chip to get a better deal because there's a
| viable alternative. Or to develop something like OpenProject,
| Kanboard etc., alternatives to the likes of Jira, that might be
| enough for many out there, while also possibly benefitting from
| community contributions. People love to complain about how Jira
| supposedly sucks, so that'd be a good opportunity to step up
| and make something "better". Or using open source technologies
| like PostgreSQL or MariaDB/MySQL for developing their own
| internal systems instead of always forking over a bunch of cash
| for Oracle or MS SQL _by default_.
|
| If you want a government that's cost efficient, then invest in
| making it be so, treat the software landscape as an investment
| opportunity - spend some money now to save a bunch of money
| later. The same way how an app can be a home cooked meal, some
| software could be a public utility.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| KronisLV wrote:
| 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 devices right now.
| wvh wrote:
| 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.
| slowtrek wrote:
| Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is
| very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't
| know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst
| startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative
| product.
| huslage wrote:
| Y Combinator. They gave it away to all of them. This is how
| you become popular with startups.
| slowtrek wrote:
| That's really gross. I guess then everyone thinks they
| need to use it because all these startups use it, but
| it's really just a simple notepad app with many
| alternatives.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| I have no interest in defending Notion or anything but...
| have you actually used it? It's not even close to a
| "simple notepad app." I mean, that's what it started off
| as, and you can use it that way, but "simple notepad app"
| is ludicrously wrong.
| pimeys wrote:
| Yep. And I've hated every second when I needed to write
| something with it. The editor of Notion is horrible,
| compared to Zed, Vim, Emacs et.al. The markdown import
| has been broken for years, and it is not easy to export
| your writeups for storage outside Notion
|
| I'm really happy I got our company out from using Notion.
| We just do markdown in Linear, which you can copy and
| paste from an editor easily.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| No, they use it because it was cheap _and useful_ , and
| switching tools to something newer that's actually better
| has to not just be better, it has to be so much better as
| to justify the time and costs required to port a bulky
| knowledge base from one platform to another.
|
| It's really just standard "voluntary lock-in": any
| knowledge system you decide to use locks you into that
| knowledge system simply because you're going to be
| generating tons of content in it, which may at some point
| need to be migrated, and the longer you use it the more
| of a hassle that'll be.
|
| And if it feels a bit gross (it's not, really, it's just
| what happens when someone has a good sales pitch) they're
| not holding your content hostage like some other
| platforms *cough*zendesk*cough*.
| mulmen wrote:
| Isn't this exactly why accelerators like Y Combinator
| exist? To provide all the necessary things that aren't
| your startup?
| staplers wrote:
| it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever
|
| Would love to move to an alternative that also works in the
| browser, got any suggestions?
|
| I haven't found one that does what Notion does. I genuinely
| want to get off their AI training grounds but cannot. Your
| comment reeks of condescension because you are not the
| target user.
| slowtrek wrote:
| Shared Google Docs.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Google Docs isn't near the same as Notion. Not even
| close.
|
| Notion treats information as a repository and keeps
| things indexed, searchable, and has some ways to
| automatically sort things, has ability to seamlessly
| create different types of documents and weave them
| together and so much more that Docs lack.
|
| Docs doesn't even have native markdown support last I
| checked
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| You can use Markdown in Google Docs, but it automatically
| gets converted to rich text. (When you copy/paste rich
| text _out_ of Google Docs, there 's also a "Copy as
| Markdown" option, but it'll default to a particular
| Markdown syntax that may not be the one you refer.)
| no_wizard wrote:
| Even conceding markdown support it still lacks the
| organization and document flexibility of notion
| StrauXX wrote:
| We are currently moving to the Odoo knowledge
| application. It's very similar to notion but much less
| sluggish.
| kiwiguy1 wrote:
| Odoo is powerful but a hideous ui and ux, which bloats
| the platform.
|
| I feel like if Odoo foxed this it could be incredibly
| useful
| jahewson wrote:
| AppFlowy is pretty notable.
|
| https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
| gcau wrote:
| >Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. The
| AI workspace where you achieve more without losing
| control of your data
|
| This is always a major red flag for me.
| dunham wrote:
| It depends on what subset of Notion you use. Nothing
| (including Notion) is perfect for me. I'd like to build
| my own eventually, but I'm currently using Obsidian which
| doesn't hit your "works in the browser" requirement.
|
| One option, which is open source and self hosted, is
| Trilium[sic], found at https://github.com/zadam/trilium
| It's open source, so if it's close to what you want, you
| might be able to adjust it to meet your needs.
|
| Other commercial options include Realm, Tana, and Craft.
| With varying degrees of "AI".
|
| I really like the UX of Tana for building out graphs of
| pages with properties, but it's slow to start up, doesn't
| support math, etc. So it's mainly a UX example for me.
| 0xf8 wrote:
| Acknowledging you want a web-app browser based
| alternative and this won't answer your question, feel
| free to ignore.
|
| But as for general notion alternatives, and actually if
| you prefer to go in the other direction away from web
| based--Hands down would recommend Obsidian.md above any
| other open source alternative.
|
| While it's not 100% "batteries included" like proprietary
| apps (though this gap has narrowed considerably),
| Obsidian truly shines if you're even slightly inclined
| toward customization. It's "hackable to the core" -- you
| can build practically anything on top of it, which
| satisfies open source purists. Yet for practical users
| not looking to build their own software, Obsidian still
| punches above its weight -- it's highly functional and
| polished out of the box, requiring zero setup to be
| immediately productive.
|
| The integrated community plugins library lets you extend
| vanilla Obsidian to match most proprietary software,
| including Notion's "databases" functionality (arguably
| Notion's best feature), LLM integration, and much more.
| Since these plugins are themselves open source, they too
| can be customized beyond their original design. It's the
| perfect blend of freedom with valuable functionality
| either built-in or one click away.
|
| What initially drove me from Notion to Obsidian wasn't
| the customization aspect, but the need for local storage
| and non-cloud syncing for sensitive data. It's egregious
| that Notion still doesn't support this outside their
| Enterprise license. I almost overlooked this by simply
| not using Notion for sensitive data, but the final straw
| came when I lost access during Notion's service outages.
| Even though these were infrequent and brief, being unable
| to access my data when needed was unacceptable. Arguing
| with devs about local storage and offline functionality
| only to face that situation made me realize how absurd it
| was that Notion doesn't even provide a cached version
| when offline. Without internet, Notion is essentially a
| brick -- your data exists somewhere in the aether, just
| not on your device. That's bananas.
|
| After switching to Obsidian and solving the local storage
| "problem" in 30 seconds, I gradually discovered more
| functionality and have since customized it as my central
| organization and research tool. Couldn't recommend it
| more highly.
|
| I'll stop my rant now -- Obsidian speaks for itself and
| doesn't need my endorsement, just as Notion's
| shortcomings are equally well-established.
| slevis wrote:
| Obsidian is on a fundamental level a very different app
| to Notion (you already mentioned the web app, databases,
| ...). It is also not even close to being "hackable to the
| core", it is not open source. That title belongs to
| Emacs.
| cmoski wrote:
| Nuclino?
| virdev wrote:
| I also have to disagree here.
|
| What Notion has built is amazing.
|
| When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft
| Office. I say it's not
|
| This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this
| community's work. If I ever get anywhere close to their
| level I'll consider myself lucky. They do important work
| and I hope they continue for may years .
|
| I'm not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has
| changed.
|
| As it came online, it became collaborative.
|
| What's replacing Microsoft isn't perfectly similar
| alternatives to text editing, spreadsheets and slides which
| are tools that were made for formatting more than content
| editing.
|
| These were meant to be printed to be shared.
|
| What's actually replacing Microsoft Office are tools like
| Notion.
|
| Nowadays content is created in real time with 4, 6 or more
| pair of hands typing at the same time. [?]
|
| The way we actually replace Microsoft Office is by building
| products that follow the change in usage like Notion has
| been doing.
|
| That's what we need to do as an opensource community.
|
| Adopting Notion won't do in times like we're living as
| states (hell, all of us!) we need strategic digital
| autonomy.
|
| The product of our collaborative work is knowledge, we
| can't have it siphoned because it's sitting on an American
| server.
|
| Notion has been leading the content over form revolution
| for a while now.
|
| But revolutions are our thing right ?
|
| We like to start them, but it's way more fun when they
| spread to the whole continent
|
| Want to join us or support us with a little GitHub
| https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
| palata wrote:
| Notion is some kind of Kanban board, isn't it? I think
| the point of the parent is that such boards were not
| invented by Notion, and writing a webapp that essentially
| allows you to move post-its between columns is not
| exactly innovative. Which is fine, if it works. We don't
| always need innovation (actually most of the time we
| don't). Notion just seems to be super popular for just
| being a webapp of post-its.
| fmbb wrote:
| Notion is a wiki. It's like Confluence but good.
|
| Maybe they have tickets and boards as well? Even better!
| setopt wrote:
| > Notion is some kind of Kanban board, isn't it?
|
| No, it's not. But I wouldn't be surprised if it _has_ a
| Kanban board.
|
| It's a proprietary cloud-based wiki with support for
| every more or less mainstream feature (multimedia,
| databases, AI integration, collaboration, etc.). It's a
| bit sluggish and doesn't have a good mobile story, but if
| you don't mind the proprietary aspect, it's otherwise a
| polished product.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Notion has a very flexible data model. We use it mainly
| for documents, but it also can contain databases, which
| can be viewed as kanban boards, timelines, etc.
|
| https://www.notion.com/blog/data-model-behind-notion
|
| It's really nice to have one place to go for all kinds of
| content, but that content can link within itself,
| @mention other pieces of content, etc.
|
| It can (and does) turn into a huge mess if you let it, of
| course. But that's down to team culture.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| You misunderstand what notion is
| kmacdough wrote:
| It's much more generic than that. It's highly flexible
| and intuitive hierarchical information organization
| software. At least that's how I'd describe it.
|
| The innovation isn't the organized structures themselves
| either, but rather the intuitive non-technical interface
| for rapidly and concurrently updating both the
| information and structure. You can build a lot of Jira-
| like features but it doesn't dictate much of how you do
| that.
|
| It does have a highly customizable Kanban _view_ of their
| more generic _database_ structure where each object is
| itself a page which can be filled with anything and
| everything else Notion has to offer (including more
| databases). Databases can have many views, structured as
| calendars, tables and a couple other forms I don 't use,
| and each view can have its own set of filters, etc.
|
| It kinda looked at Jira+Confluence and asked "what's the
| simplest fundametal software which can be used to build
| everything they have to offer"
| j45 wrote:
| Notion is good, maybe great for some but small things
| holding it back from becoming ubiquitous.
|
| Does notion work offline-first yet?
|
| The only copy of my data should not exist solely in an
| app's cloud, and I should not need to manually export
| anything.
|
| Collaboration is nice, still has nothing to do with being
| offline-first.
|
| Docs looks very promising. Congrats to the remnant he
| launch.
|
| Another effort that might be a subset of Docs is Anytype
| - another French effort that seems to be very promising.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Does notion work offline-first yet?
|
| It does via a desktop application.
| j45 wrote:
| Must be relatively recently.
|
| Maybe mobile will be important enough and enough users
| one day to have offline-first support.
| kellpossible2 wrote:
| please name some open source (or lower priced) alternatives
| that support: comments on documents, database functionality
| to a similar level, publishing websites, scripting for
| properties. I'm very curious!
| somat wrote:
| The unix operating environment.
|
| I was going to say git, but really you need the whole
| environment.
| bigiain wrote:
| Heh. I remember back in the comp.lang.perl.misc days,
| where newbies would show up and ask "What's the best IDE
| for Perl development" and all the longtime greybeards
| would reply "Unix".
| paulgb wrote:
| When it came out, block-based editing and always-on wysiwig
| were novel, and Notion was definitely more delightful than
| the existing "internal wiki" software category (Confluence
| etc.)
| slevis wrote:
| Several companies have tried to "reproduce" Notion and have
| failed. I don't like or use Notion but that is just
| extremely ignorant of the USP behind it. Dunning-Kruger
| much?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Notion's data model is incredible, actually. You can embed
| almost anything into it, and make it work across your
| knowledge base.
|
| Databases work like spreadsheets, and you can embed pages
| inside them, too. In fact, every row is a potential page,
| if you want.
|
| While I prefer Obsidian for my technical (public and
| private) knowledge bases, life organization, and specific
| help pages I create for relatives live in Notion, and it
| works really well. Being able to script and formulate
| things allows great flexibility.
|
| What I'm not very comfortable yet is "ejecting" from
| Notion, since the data model is so convoluted, what they
| give you as a package is not very convenient, yet.
|
| Evernote had the best mechanism, giving you an XML file and
| an official XSLT to read/verify/transform what they give
| you. However, Evernote feels very underpowered when you
| start to use formulae and automation across your database.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| are you a notion employee?
|
| the data model is banal. just a tree with limited "type"
| strings for the special things. it's literally no
| different than any other file format. and they make it as
| difficult to export as all the other companies
| berkes wrote:
| > 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 doesn't tick.
| Edit: But most of all, what "boxes notion ticks" very much
| depends on your (teams) needs and usage. A feature you may
| deem unimportant or even an anti-feature may very well be
| what keeps a lot of people on notion because no alternative
| has it.
|
| The closest I have seen and used is appflowy. In some areas
| it ticks boxes that notion doesn't. But it's also "0.x"
| version software: self-admiddetly not 1.x stable software.
| And this has been in the makings since nov 2021, so over
| three years. Over three years of development to get to a
| point that it's on-par-ish with Notion.
|
| If it takes a team three years to reproduce "the most
| reproducible app", it's clear that this app isn't that
| reproducible at all. And that's just reproducing features
| (amongst witch UX and UI). Reproducible also includes
| familiarity: It's almost a no-brainer to get a team on
| notion and to have management pay a pro licence. It's much
| harder, to impossible, to do this with [insert any
| alternative].
| k__ wrote:
| 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
| :/
| wvh wrote:
| Funny how someone can invent a word such as Jirafied and
| most of us know exactly what that means.
| naravara wrote:
| The other thing Notion has that's tough to replicate is
| the network effects. Enough "influencer" type people use
| it that there's a pretty rich universe of readymade and
| shareable templates and workflows available for other
| users. These can be replicated in similar applications,
| but that takes work.
|
| The fact that it got popular with productivity
| influencers seems pretty key to its initial and sustained
| popularity, even if it's performance and the general
| clunkiness of its interface is frustrating.
| daveguy wrote:
| > ... seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the
| government isn't incompetent. For example, if we had
| governments with strong tech departments that could fund
| helping the development of...
|
| The US had two very strong and competent tech departments --
| 18F and USDS.
|
| They got doge'd -- dismantled and coopted, respectively.
| rapnie wrote:
| All those competent departments. Dismantled on a whim. It
| is unbelievable. How many billions of investment dollars
| are wasted that way, spent during many years to organize
| such departments efficiently?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| 18F and USDS were actually relatively cheap in the grand
| scale of government software procurement.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| 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 such that for X EUR per year they get Y competent
| developers to work on LibreOffice, or whatever they like.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Why do you think software is outside the area of expertise
| of government?
| stephenr wrote:
| > it is way outside their area of expertise
|
| You realise that when governments write software, they just
| hire software developers, and designers, and project
| managers like any other organisation does, right?
|
| They're not just asking around in parliament "so who has
| dabbled in python?" or what have you.
| davedx wrote:
| Not controversial just ignorant. Various governments have
| been participating or creating open source for many years
| now
| wvh wrote:
| 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...
| regularjack wrote:
| I'd much rather have my government finance open source
| software for citizens to use than whatever tech behemoth of
| a foreign country.
| sofixa wrote:
| This is hilariously ignorant, especially when it comes to
| France.
|
| There are a ton of open source government projects from
| various agencies and contributing universities - from the
| government SSO (https://github.com/france-connect) to the
| Covid contact tracing and health pass management app
| (https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19) to the tax code to
| the unemployment app to a million other things
| (https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome). And all of them
| are good, usable, and (almost always) with permissive
| licenses.
|
| Why hire an external vendor that _has_ to add a profit
| margin, and lose the competency when that vendor changes
| for the next contract, or become a hostage to them? You
| literally can only lose.
| Angostura wrote:
| I'd quite like good software to be squarely within their
| area of expertise
| artur_makly wrote:
| But wouldn't a DAPP solution would solve even more problems..
| faster? What am I missing?
| wslh wrote:
| > Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes
| unmaintained in the future
|
| We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired,
| deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future. Risks exist on
| both sides.
| diggan wrote:
| > We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired,
| deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future.
|
| At this point, I feel like we can be pretty sure the
| combination of "Huge VC investments + for-profit startup"
| will with 99% certainly eventually lead down the road of
| enshittification, either by acquisition or by going public.
| At least based on most previous "internet" startups with that
| combination.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted... This is exactly
| where the incentives lead the VC-funded companies. Unless
| they can be extremely profitable by charging money for
| their product of course, but I don't think Notion can pull
| this off. The market is just not there, imho.
| conradfr wrote:
| It's not even cheap.
| bluedino wrote:
| Anyone remember Evernote?
| esafak wrote:
| It happened to Coda.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I couldn't upvote you more than once.
|
| I agree wholeheartedly with your point.
|
| Government-funded open source like this, creating alternatives
| is a good idea. Taxes put to good use!
| virdev wrote:
| Yes yes yes and yes Public Money Public Code!
| aitchnyu wrote:
| How does it work when gov outsources major tech to the
| private sector?
| sitkack wrote:
| That is what grants are for! The government(s) get the exact
| software they want by a whole field full of folks that know how
| to make those changes.
| virdev wrote:
| Docs actually thanks to the open source grant system we have
| in Europe. The hard part in a project like Docs is the text
| editor. We built Docs on top of
| [Blocknotejs](https://www.blocknotejs.org/) an [NGI
| funded](https://ngi.eu/funded_solution/blocknote/) library.
| NGI (Next Generation Internet) and NLNet has been doing an
| amazing job funding thousands of projects and we are seing
| the amazing results today. NGI is a program of the European
| Union
| sitkack wrote:
| Nice. Wonderful! This needs to spread as far and wide as it
| can.
| zwnow wrote:
| Speaking from experience, in Germany people refuse to learn any
| new software and are quickly overwhelmed if 1 thing is
| different from what they are used to. Open source government
| solutions are good and all, people will only use them if forced
| to by law though. Public offices are one of the reasons our
| digitalization is really far behind.
| wvh wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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?
| maelito wrote:
| That's what I hope too. Trump's failure could be our far-
| right failure to win the 2027 elections.
| mmooss wrote:
| That's been the Democratic Party's strategy for decades:
| Don't confront them and the Republican candidate, Trump in
| particular, will 'shoot themselves in the foot'.How is that
| working? On their part, it's just cowardice and laziness.
|
| There is no way you will win, no way they will stop, unless
| you fight (politically and socially) and defeat them.
| deskr wrote:
| 20 years. That's step 1, Demoralization:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsKvG6WMI
| thrance wrote:
| That was very interesting, Russia switched from pushing
| "marxism-leninism" to general reactionary ideas, which seem
| to take better in our current age.
|
| I'd add that they also found powerful allies in western
| oligarchs, who have a vested interest in the dismantling of
| the state for personal gains.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The far-right is a symptom of what is happening in
| France.
|
| They are having the same outcomes using the same tactics
| all over the world. It's not dependant on the country.
| froggertoaster wrote:
| I would hardly decide to trust a politician based on a 5 second
| quip on live TV.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Yea I agree , fair point. Though I think , I would probably
| study more about france's current system to trust it more but
| that requires efforts and in general a sense of direction
| (like which country / politician to even start reading to
| start to generate trust from reason )
|
| I was more about talking trust from intuition which can then
| create that sense of direction.
|
| I thank you for creating this comment. I gotta read more
| about macron to see if he's really how I felt from my
| intution.
| jisnsm wrote:
| >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.
|
| Because you are reading a lot of destabilisation propaganda
| online. I recommend you cut your news and social networks
| consumption a little bit.
|
| The fact that you are beginning to trust FRANCE over something
| that MACRON did, no less, speaks volumes.
| myko wrote:
| It is completely reasonable to see France in that light given
| recent history of the US - a man who should be in prison for
| insurrection is the head of the executive.
| diggan wrote:
| > a man who should be in prison for insurrection is the
| head of the executive
|
| I'm no France-lover (hugs from north-east of Spain), but I
| think this sums up things pretty well. Someone who would
| have been jailed in any other democracy, is now the head of
| government, somehow.
|
| Given France's experience with democracy and how hard it is
| to keep, and America's lack of experience (as a country and
| democracy), makes me trust France a lot more today.
| jisnsm wrote:
| Being Spanish you know very well that our current
| president should also be in prison. So I will trust your
| word.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Exactly!!!
|
| This was the exact sentiment I was trying to capture.
|
| Along with the fact that a lot of american politics
| simply doesn't make much sense to me following it. So
| that also helps.
|
| the fact that france's president put his stance forward
| and corrected american's president's blatant lie also
| contributed just a little in my ignorant tiny world
| bubble to really considering about france as a more
| trustworthy country and then reasoning from it to
| concluding it as true.
|
| There might be many other countries as well who are more
| trust worthy than france , but certain events which put
| them in spotlight would be required for the normies like
| me to find it.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| May I clarify my comment.
|
| Trust was maybe a different word , maybe hope is the correct
| word ? (but doesn't everybody trust hope)
|
| But I trust the people who can make me hope for a better
| future by actively not submitting to those people who are
| actively trying to reduce my hope in better future.
|
| There is absolutely no denying that what Trump has done , has
| absolutely made many people really hopeless. Such levels of
| incompetency at a presidential level just feels weird. Its as
| if nobody is seeing how absurd things are , when you connect
| everything.
|
| Maybe its me , but this presidency feels like a chaos to me
| as an outsider / foreigner.
|
| America , as it is right now , is a failed state.
|
| I don't understand , don't we trust countries based on their
| stability and their stance. Such level of open defiance is
| what makes me trust france that they are more likely to stand
| to facts than ahem america.
|
| To be honest , maybe I am being too gloom / sad over america.
| It feels like the world is shifting towards a russo-american
| , european , chinese influenceced multi polar world.
|
| What america really hated russia was for are just past wars ,
| but britain and france also had these but they collectively
| became allies after world war.
|
| May I ask , where in my total arguments , am I sounding
| unreasonable? I thought it doesn't matter where you read the
| news , I was able to reason to a pessimist outlook of the
| trump presidency.
|
| Everything is a propaganda , propaganda literally means
| something along the lines of sharing your ideas.
|
| Listening to propaganda isn't bad , but blindly advocating
| for it without reason is bad and dismissing other opinions
| without reason to fulfill your bias is bad.
|
| If you can really counter my reason , then hey , I can be
| glad that I don't have to be sad about USA.
|
| Also , I watched a video somewhere that we have a limited
| amount of (he said "fucks" but in the sense of I give a fuck)
| things you can care and you have to use it wisely.
|
| I really was giving too much care about USA but I have
| stopped caring now since its not my country anyway and what
| power do I really have? Maybe it might be my own fault / I
| read some things without really applying my own reason.
|
| I am sorry if it offends people but this is my honest opinion
| America has fallen in my eyes. And there is nothing I can do
| to change that , so why even care about america?
| jisnsm wrote:
| I am European. I know who Macron is. I know what he does.
| If one sees Macron as something other than someone who is
| willing to sell out his country for his masters, that seems
| unreasonable to me. If the hope of Europe is put on someone
| like Macron we know that Europe is hopeless. (I think it
| is)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Firstly, you raise good points , so can you please
| elaborate?
|
| also , whom Do you actually put hope on Europe?
|
| > UK actively tries censorship against apple encryption
| etc.
|
| Yes there are countries like germany whose people are
| really nice ,and I don't mean to offend any european but
| maybe its my own fault , but I don't know the name of
| german prime minister (or is it president?) , yes I can
| search it , but quite frankly , though I have more
| knowledge about all the countries and somewhat their
| borders etc. in europe , I don't remember their
| politicians except Macron.
|
| It truly shows my ignorance but I just follow world
| affairs and I don't see many references to other
| presidents but rather their countries.
|
| I may be wrong , I usually am , but judging from your
| tone , to me it seems that you wouldn't prefer right /
| conservative politicans .
|
| Macron is a liberal (I fact checked using wiki) , and you
| are being dissatisfied with liberal politics considering
| selling his country for his masters comment?
|
| I still don't understand this comment though , forgive my
| ignorance and please share references.
|
| I am not sure if I am violating with hacker news comments
| by being too political and I am sorry for that but I am
| genuinely interested what your political leanings are.
|
| To me , as a self acclaimed centrist who just believes in
| georgism and certain measures , these are only some
| moderately radical , not completely radical like
| socialism steps that I wish for a govt.
|
| To be honest , I have this feeling that all politicians
| are evil and you have to choose the leser evil. I can
| think of running into politics but as a common man , its
| gonna be quite hard and you really have to engineer
| yourself for it which can be quite hard for normies so it
| attracts a lot of people who expect something out of
| running into politics and not for the good will of the
| people.
| jisnsm wrote:
| I think Europe is hopeless. It's an old continent full of
| old people who have a deeply vested interest in
| maintaining the status quo. What Europe needs is a
| revolution of the young, but demographically that is
| impossible to happen. The old are willing to sell the
| young cheap if it means their pensions get increased by
| 0.1%. That is the source of all the problems in the
| continent, everything stems from that. From out of
| control immigration to skyrocketing rent prices.
|
| Choosing the lesser evil doesn't cut it. You are still
| choosing and being complicit with evil. Siding with evil
| is Wrong. Relativism is a disease. Evil is evil.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| "I think Europe is hopeless. It's an old continent full
| of old people who have a deeply vested interest in
| maintaining the status quo"
|
| By this , do you mean the Average age of a person or
| birth rate or what exactly , because I think europe
| doesn't have those issues.
|
| Are you mentioning the fact that Europe has power vested
| in the old. Doesn't everybody ? Maybe you are mentioning
| this in the fact that europe doesn't have a startup
| culture like silicon valley which can give newcomers
| (young passionate people) a incentive.
|
| I definitely have some points over relativism and though
| I don't necessarily agree with that , I think we can
| first agree to discuss about what you mean by the old
| people comment.
|
| By status quo , what do you mean exactly ?
| jisnsm wrote:
| Look at population pyramids. Europe is old.
|
| Most people are looking up to retirement and their
| pensions. The system is unsustainable and predatory on
| young people. They pay an overwhelming amount of taxes to
| sustain this system. It also needs massive immigration
| which causes severe security and cultural problems, but
| they don't care as long as that guarantees they will get
| their pension.
|
| Same about housing. It's old people who own houses. They
| vote so new housing doesn't get built as to keep the high
| value of their houses. They don't care that young people
| can't afford rent.
|
| Many other examples you can think of probably. It's a
| society that caters to the old. The young get screwed.
| And there's nothing they can do because they are
| outnumbered and that will only get worse.
|
| This is the status quo. A society that functions like
| this is dead.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Basically housing & pensions ? Don't they pay for the
| pensions from their own money, something like Social
| Security?
|
| Housing is a problem in every country and I totally agree
| about that. I myself, really like the georgist philosophy
| of economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
|
| I doubt if this system really is broken. Catering to the
| old people's pensions so that they can live and unlike
| america's social security system which was recently cut
| by doge, which impacts every old person. I think it's
| decent? What suggestions do you think could help with the
| pensions scheme
| megamorf wrote:
| Space goes after the comma, not in front of it.
| yujzgzc wrote:
| Care to elaborate on what you mean by "his masters"?
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| Why do you put spaces before commas? It's unnecessary and
| makes your writing obnoxious to read.
| megamorf wrote:
| Seconded, it's really irritating
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Noted. Mostly I try it to create space / distinguish the
| comma, I think It has been ingrained in me for quite some
| time. I think I misunderstood the rule of space after
| comma to include it before comma as well.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| When it comes to the use of cutting edge technology to further
| the goals of the people at large, France has been a leader for
| some time. As for why you're just noticing now, perhaps the
| time has come for the rest of us to do the same.
| atmosx wrote:
| Macron's approval ratings must be below 3% by now. If he had
| any backbone, he'd resign immediately.
| phtrivier wrote:
| You made me look : it's about 27% [1], which is of course not
| great, but actually not that bad _for him_, _in the past few
| years_.
|
| The political landscape is completely split in 3 thirds in
| France at the moment, and people stay firmly in their lanes.
|
| It would need an incredibly popular decision to bring anyone
| from the left or far right to approve of him.
|
| [1] https://www.latribune.fr/la-tribune-
| dimanche/politique/barom...
| Lutger wrote:
| Thanks for actually looking things up instead of dreaming
| things up. This reminds me of Trumps claim that Zelensky is
| a hugely impopulair dictator, whereas in fact his approval
| ratings far exceed Trumps and he is very much legally
| chosen.
|
| Misinformation is a disease.
| phtrivier wrote:
| That said, I was also expecting smaller numbers, mostly
| based on how comedians are routinely roasting him about
| his latest declaration on Russia.
|
| So there is, at the same time, an "oh, god, he's trying
| to use Russian fearmongering" effect that is just too big
| for comedians not to use ; and, somehow, a "rally around
| the flag" effect where people thinks he's actually on to
| something.
|
| I would love to know if someone has studied the effects
| of comedians on misinformation. Hyperbole and
| exagerations are par for the course when making jokes - I
| just don't know if people are starting to take comedians
| both seriously (as you should) and literally (as you
| should not.)
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| 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.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Does this provide database functionality like seen in Notion?
|
| I'm always disappointed by note-taking tools calling themselves a
| Notion alternative when they do not provide an alternative to
| Notion and are instead just another note-taking tool with a
| simple UI.
|
| If you want to be a Notion alternative provide the things that
| make Notion great, e.g. the database functionality. It's okay to
| be a simple colaborative notes tool, but that is not a Notion
| alternative.
| maelito wrote:
| As far as I know, the database part is handled by Grist, listed
| on the suite of tools this note app is part of.
|
| https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
|
| Of course, it's not a replacement to Notion yet.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| I'm actually not talking about how they handle the database
| but instead the Database feature of Notion, which is more of
| a advanced table for the user that can be turned into a
| Kanban, timeline, calendar, etc. It's one of the main
| advantages Notion has over other note-taking tools.
| johnecheck wrote:
| Yup, this is my biggest question too. I'd love to switch to
| this but I definitely need my relational database features.
| maelito wrote:
| Sorry, my comment was not clear. The database of La Suite
| is Grist. Notes is part of La Suite, a broader project.
| https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's a little like products that brands themselves as a "Jira
| replacement". Yes, you got the basic functionality down, but so
| does a hundred other projects. You're not really dealing with
| the hard problems or the advanced features. Maybe in the future
| yes, but a replacement... a potential future replacement maybe.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Tbf Jira's "hard problems" are really things that shouldn't
| be done in the first place, like the insane configurability.
| Just ends up in a mess.
|
| The problem with Jira is that it's enterprise software that's
| put in place by people that don't actually have to use it.
| Terretta wrote:
| Craft has collections for tables of data, also has a variety of
| other data modeled things like TODOs: https://www.craft.do/
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Sadly that tool seems to be subscription only? And it does
| not have an Android version even though they are on iOS.
| sylvinus wrote:
| Not really a database, but I've made a prototype integration of
| Docs with IronCalc:
| https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/pull/466
|
| This could also take the form of a custom block that you could
| embed in a text document.
| virdev wrote:
| Hey! Docs's PM here.
|
| IMO Notion really made an awesome job with real-time, collab
| features (comments, suggestions) and useful AI actions. So
| much, people only see databases ^^.
|
| For now we'll be focusing on these. That's already plenty ^^
| Further down road we'll if we manage to take on databases.
| rtpg wrote:
| Having both the Notion-like UI and the real time collaboration is
| exciting! So much stuff has been either/or, and it made it hard
| for me to find a good alternative.
|
| I really appreciate how Notion is basically "what if Google Docs
| but you can actually organize your information". The
| collaborative components feel really powerful.
|
| I do kind of wish that something that was more ... Wiki-flavored
| would show up though. I like confluence, it's just mega slow!
| bryanhogan wrote:
| What about markdown based tools that focused on the linking
| part, e.g. Haptic or Logseq, is that wiki-flavored enough?
| tommoor wrote:
| You should take a look at Outline (mentioned in the title).
| https://www.getoutline.com/
| theflash666 wrote:
| All features aren't available in the community edition ...
| tommoor wrote:
| Right, but the vast majority are - include those they are
| talking about.
| maelito wrote:
| This tool is part of a WIP complete suite of tools for public
| agents called "La suite numerique".
|
| https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
| weakfish wrote:
| This is awesome!
| remram wrote:
| Ah this makes sense, I was going to comment that "docs" was not
| really a suitable name.
|
| What is the correct full name then? lasuite docs (judging from
| the logo, that seem to be the brand part)? docs numerique (from
| the URL)?
| maelito wrote:
| numerique.gouv is like digital.gov. Kind of a whole ministry.
|
| La Suite Docs is better yes.
| Terretta wrote:
| That said, calling the video conferencing capability "Visio" is
| a la banane.
| theflash666 wrote:
| "Visio" is French slang for a videoconference meeting. Open
| to suggestions for a project name that better reflects its
| purpose and vision.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I love the effort that is going on here. I'm just curious
| about some of the efforts taken here. The Docs seems like a
| good approach to just build it, but really wondering what
| the motivation behind building another video chat platform
| was instead of using and improving rather mature OSS
| solutions like Jitsi.
| mkl wrote:
| Visio is a Microsoft Office app:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-365/visio/flowchar...
| modderation wrote:
| How about "Vidja" -- the .fr domain seems to be available,
| the top google hit is for an IKEA floor lamp, and it is
| generally a silly English mispronunciation of "video" (you
| kids and yer vidja games...) :)
| drowntoge wrote:
| Tchap looks neat as a Slack alternative, but it seems like it's
| still only for government workers.
| IshKebab wrote:
| We use Mattermost at work, and apart from the mobile app
| being a bit shit, and search being kind of useless, it's
| easily as good as Slack. In some ways it's better, e.g. you
| can use proper Markdown in messages instead of Slack's Mrkdwn
| abomination that doesn't even allow links.
|
| I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a
| critical feature in a company.
| zellyn wrote:
| ? I put Slack into non-rich-text-editor mode and use
| standard markdown link syntax dozens of times a day
| IshKebab wrote:
| Well maybe they've added that in the past 2 years but
| certainly 2 years ago you could only add links using rich
| text mode.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| search is the #1 feature I use in our corporate slack
| (huge, huge instance).
|
| without search it's useless.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It has search, it's just very basic. Only searches for
| exactly what you put etc.
|
| I remember Slack's search being equally crap when I last
| used it a couple of years ago.
| Zekio wrote:
| sounds exactly like slacks search, except slack also
| doesn't find exactly what you put in sometimes... (think
| the indexing isn't very fast because sometime a day old
| message is impossible to search for)
| maelito wrote:
| Tchap is just Element/Matrix with some gov specific features.
| bcye wrote:
| adding to this, it seems to me like most of the projects are
| yet to be open sourced. the github currently has docs and their
| video conferencing tool (which also looks great):
| https://github.com/suitenumerique
| manuhabitela wrote:
| All the projects are already open sourced actually, but
| admittedly all don't have documentation as good as docs or
| meet. Still a wip :)
| bcye wrote:
| Cool! Are they under a different GitHub org? I couldn't
| find grist or tchap
| theflash666 wrote:
| The open-source project Grist Core
| (https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core) is developed in
| the United States, with contributions from some French
| gov tech team.
| theflash666 wrote:
| Tchap is based on Matrix and Element,
| https://github.com/element-hq
| MockingHawk wrote:
| Some of the projects are on this org
| https://github.com/numerique-gouv/ but there are way more
| projects that the suite numerique there
| chanux wrote:
| Gives Etherpad vibes!
| ecwilson wrote:
| I was going to post this exact same comment. I was obsessed
| with Etherpad when it came out and to this day, reminisce about
| it whenever I fire up a Google Doc. Can't wait to try this.
| bureautards wrote:
| yes, make better notes of meetings, make meetings a pleasure,
| make bureaucracy a dream job
| wiltonn wrote:
| Or just stop paying for notion.
| joking wrote:
| I like almost everything from this project, even the
| documentation and development is being done in the open, with
| design docs like this:
| https://www.figma.com/design/qdCWR4tTUr7vQSecEjCyqO/DOCS?nod...
| replwoacause wrote:
| It really feels like we are in a time where EU countries are
| taking front and center on the world stage with cool, progressive
| and unified stuff, and the US is in the ally snorting crack.
| Saying this as a disappointed American. But yeah...really cool to
| see governments collaborating this way.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| It's not like the US wasn't warned about this repeatedly for
| decades, and yet we chose this.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Looking at how much infrastructure needs to be spun up, I don't
| really see this as a good solution for personal note taking. If
| you use the Docker environment, you spin up 10 or more
| containers... including KeyClock. I get that this is intended to
| by hosted by a company or an organisation, but plenty of people
| are using Notion just as individuals.
|
| Most people would be better of with Obsidian, Bear, Notion or
| even Apple Notes.
| johnecheck wrote:
| If we can spin up the 10 containers with a single docker
| compose command on a $5/month VPS, this really doesn't seem
| like too much for an individual.
|
| And the best part: this is MIT licensed. If it's actually
| difficult to set up, build a nice web UI that makes it easy and
| you've got a product.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I'm not worried about the cost, you can probably run all of
| it in the closet on a Raspberry Pi, it's the complexity. What
| do you do when part of this inevitably fail, how do you get
| your data back out, where is the data? In Minio, in
| Postgresql?
| wim wrote:
| We're working on an "IDE for notes/tasks" [1] in the space of
| Notion and so on where you can easily self-host the sync
| backend with a single binary.
|
| The idea is that you can choose between cloud or self-host (and
| "eject" at any time to switch between the two if you ever
| change your mind). We hope that might be a good balance between
| some companies or individuals wanting to self-host but still
| making it accessible when you don't know how any of that works,
| which indeed can get complicated fast.
|
| [1] https://thymer.com/
| weakfish wrote:
| I'd love to try this out - I signed up for beta access.
| Looking forward to giving it a shot!
| ukuina wrote:
| This looks neat! Will the self-hosted binary function in air-
| gapped environments?
| jdvh wrote:
| Absolutely. There is no phone-home of any kind.
| wim wrote:
| Yep, should work!
| thor-rodrigues wrote:
| That looks VERY AWESOME. Really looking forward to try it :)
| drio0 wrote:
| do you plan to have a mobile app?
|
| would you implement database function like in Notion?
|
| Is it a full feature todo app or just noting down tasks?
|
| would be a killer app if it has 3 Yes
| jdvh wrote:
| 1. Planned, but our first focus is the web app (plus
| desktop Electron)
|
| 2. Yes. We have a bunch of default views like table,
| kanban, photo gallery, and calendar. You can also create
| your own views with a JS plugin, like this silly example of
| spinning globe view:
| https://x.com/wcools/status/1898828593255346287
|
| 3. Our aim is a full feature todo app. But we won't have
| every feature on day 1.
| jeelthompson wrote:
| This looks really cool, signed up for early access. Any plans
| to have an import from notion feature? I've used notion for
| personal note taking and manually moving over would be a big
| time sync at this point. But I'd love to have a self hosted
| solution.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Also going to sign up.
|
| Love your site. Looks great. Lots of visual appeal. Not the
| same cookies cutter Tailwind theme that seems to be present
| everywhere.
| Bigpet wrote:
| looks neat. Like Acreom, but with better collaboration
| capabilities.
| Nelkins wrote:
| I see you can @ people. Does that mean you can get
| notifications when you've been @-ed? Also, is there the
| ability to comment on documents? For me these are two killer
| features to leave a Notion or Confluence.
| xena wrote:
| Honestly it's a reasonable set of dependencies:
|
| * Postgres for permanent storage
|
| * an OIDC identity provider so you don't have to make your own
| password system
|
| * Redis for caching
|
| * S3-compatible object storage (so you don't have to reinvent
| file uploads)
|
| * The app itself
|
| What would you rather them do? Waste time reinventing the wheel
| for no reason? If you have the IDP and object storage setup
| already figured out you can get away with just the app,
| postgres, and redis.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| That's a typical tech answer. Do you really want to spin up
| 10 images for note taking for yourself? From a product
| standpoint that's not sensible and wastes way to much
| resources.
| vvillena wrote:
| Good thing this is a server app and not an end-user
| product, then.
| theflash666 wrote:
| you usually don't need a collaborative product when taking
| note for yourself
| dymk wrote:
| Why do I care how many images it's spinning up? That's an
| implementation detail - I just copy/paste a docker-compose
| configuration.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Are you sure? It's a collaborative note taking application
| which is designed to support large groups.
|
| A similar project we collaborate on has Helm charts as an
| option. "Are you mad? You run an online archive with how
| many pods, come again?" You may say.
|
| "When said archive can handle a continent's load and scale
| almost indefinitely, you engineer things differently", I'll
| answer.
|
| Also, nobody will probably make this comment, if the said
| application was built by a private company and was not open
| source.
| sylvinus wrote:
| Our primary target is indeed larger organizations but we're
| working on one-click deployment solutions and an all-in-one
| container.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| This is an internal tool (which was open sourced) made by the
| French government digital service to be used by French
| government employee on French government infra. I do not think
| it is trying to be a better solution for individuals. It's
| trying to be a better solution for gov employees.
| dkobia wrote:
| I love this. Open source projects often suffer from a combination
| of a funding crisis and maintainer burnout. I think state funded
| open source projects are a wonderful idea!
|
| By investing in open source projects, governments can create more
| efficient, transparent, and innovative digital services. If
| anything I'm sure it'll save tax payers money on expensive
| licenses paid to a company in another country.
| kijin wrote:
| It's also about risk management from the government's
| perspective. You don't want to be beholden to a potentially
| hostile foreign corporation for tasks as essential as managing
| your own documents. Compared to how much money they already
| spend on American SaaS, Investing a few million euros in open-
| source alternatives could be seen as cheap insurance.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Outline is open source.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| Yeah, but BSL license
| theflash666 wrote:
| From my understanding, all features are not open source, for
| example organization management aren't open-source, which
| limits its adoption in large institution ...
| crabmusket wrote:
| It's Business Source License
|
| https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE
| thor-rodrigues wrote:
| 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, server location, and
| integration flexibility, rather than simply forcing users into
| long-term subscriptions.
|
| That's why I'm glad to see governments supporting Open Source
| alternatives to proprietary office software. Paying recurring
| subscription fees for low-maintenance tools like MS Office feels
| out of touch--especially when Microsoft once offered a one-time
| purchase model before shifting to SaaS to maximize profits. This
| change has made it difficult for individuals and businesses to
| retain long-term ownership of their tools without being tied to
| costly and recurring fees. The same trend has played out across
| the software industry, from design tools like Adobe Creative
| Cloud (which replaced one-time purchases with a mandatory
| subscription model) to communication platforms like Slack and
| Zoom, which lock companies into ongoing costs while limiting
| interoperability with other solutions.
| bjackman wrote:
| > 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 that provides the most service
| per dollar. But that enlightenment does require some education.
|
| [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/1009932/
| maxyurk wrote:
| JFrog is doing very well financially with an excellent self-
| hosted offering
| GraemeMeyer wrote:
| Microsoft still offers one-time purchase for Office by the way
| - Office 2024 was recently released.
| jahewson wrote:
| Large organisations had access to subscription software long
| before modern SaaS, and chose to use it. In the 1990s Microsoft
| offered an Enterprise Agreement that operated in this manner.
| Support is also something that large organisations value and
| are happy to subscribe to.
| jjice wrote:
| It feels like notetaking/wiki software have gotten a resurgence
| in the last few years. Not that it was ever not a thing, but like
| a new generation of people realized wanted to build new tools for
| it.
|
| Personally, I think the variety of tools is very interesting, and
| while I like Obsidian and plain markdown file, I do love to see
| different options in the space with hosted options and different
| capabilities.
|
| Notion feels like it's got this serious range from individuals up
| to teams at large enterprises. It's incredibly flexible and
| configurable and I have to assume that's a big part of it, but it
| was so interesting to watch it eat away at other things like
| Confluence over the years. My perspective is probably skewed (and
| I know Confluence and other are probably still massive and
| dominant), but I'm surprised such a simple concept is getting so
| much more software. Or actually, that's probably why it's a space
| with so much software.
| Terretta wrote:
| If you're familiar with the space, ever heard anything that
| ticks all these boxes:
|
| (a) git versioned
|
| (b) CRDTs
|
| (c) WYSIWYG but Markdown (esp GFM)
|
| (d) front matter + markdown able to be SSGd
|
| (e) comfortable UI for not-devs
|
| (f) native (Swift) MacOS app, else Tauri/Electron self-hosted
| client+svc
|
| (g) if online, OIDC / SAML SSO
|
| Appears this can be cobbled leveraging Obsidian plugins, but
| unstable due to git vs. CRDT issues. And there are a few "CMS"
| for SSG stacks that almost but not quite meet this.
| dtkav wrote:
| Dev of the Obsidian Relay plugin [0] here.
|
| We support most of this (you'll need to also use Obsidian
| Git), but haven't released OIDC (please reach out of you need
| it!).
|
| [0] https://system3.md/relay
| trees101 wrote:
| very interesting, I'm looking for something like this, will
| check it out. In my obsdian vault, I keep a lot of code
| snippets and even entire python scripts. Do you see your
| method as being perhaps an alternative to dedicated github
| repos for tiny personal projects, replacing a million
| little repos? And at the same time having notes in the same
| repo?
|
| Have you solved the git repo index problem, Ive found that
| large vaults cause a problem and require occasional
| cleanup:
|
| ```bash git gc --prune=now # Garbage collection
|
| git repack -ad # Repacked objects, optimizing repository
| storage ```
| borgster wrote:
| Qownnotes. Syncs with cloud for multi device.
| trendschau wrote:
| I'm also a bit surprised by this, but it really seems like
| there's a growing need, maybe as a way to handle information
| overload or keep up with the ever-faster pace of learning and
| change.
|
| When I started Typemill.net years ago, my focus was actually on
| ebook publishing. But over time, I noticed that a lot of small
| businesses were looking for lightweight tools for
| documentation, note-taking, and similar content. So, I
| naturally shifted to documentation and small knowledge bases.
|
| For a long time, this space was pretty much dominated by big
| enterprise tools like Confluence on one side and Evernote on
| the other. But now, with tools like Obsidian, BookStack,
| Docmost, Outline, and others, there's finally a broad range of
| modern solutions that fit different needs and sizes. I think
| that's a great step forward...
| yread wrote:
| How does it compare to nextcloud?
| jxf wrote:
| I like this! One note: I think the README would also benefit from
| having a (crowdsourced?) list of providers that offer (or will
| soon offer) Docs as a hosted offering. Many users of
| collaborative editing tools aren't sophisticated enough to
| actually host an instance.
| yujzgzc wrote:
| I stopped reading at "AGPL". I appreciate the intent but this
| stuff is impossible to use in practice. Even governments need
| partners who would likely be hesitant to run it because of that.
| bcye wrote:
| It is MIT licensed not AGPL, explicitly to make it easy to use
| for anyone. AGPL only applies if you want to use MinIO as your
| object storage
| yujzgzc wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying. They just removed the mention of AGPL
| due to the confusing nature of it. https://github.com/suitenu
| merique/docs/commit/c85224af425261...
| vvpan wrote:
| How does AGPL work in the context of a non-compiled language
| like Python? Honest question.
| iamsanteri wrote:
| Love this! Would be interesting to know why they chose Django.
| Will support by giving my upvote!
| mightysashiman wrote:
| How does it compare to Anytype? (less clunky and unintuitive I
| hope?)
| mightysashiman wrote:
| On the test account: "Error 429: too many requests".
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm intrigued by the decision to call it "Docs".
|
| In any other circumstance it would be a clear trademark
| infringement on Google Docs. It's literally the same product with
| the same name, it has an extremely similar logo and almost
| exactly the same typeface in its logo.
|
| But since this is a government project between France and
| Germany, maybe governments are allowed to ignore trademarks? Or
| Google wants to stay on their good side because of all the fines,
| so the last thing it's going to do is sue them for trademark
| infringement?
|
| I've never seen a legal situation like this before.
| dewey wrote:
| I guess that's the "problem" with generic product names.
| There's also Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Microsoft
| Calendar etc. - Docs is not different than that.
| crazygringo wrote:
| "Docs" isn't that generic. It's not even a word in the
| dictionary. It's the plural of an abbreviation. Nobody called
| a word processor "Docs" before Google did.
|
| If you say "open Calendar", I don't know if you mean Apple or
| Google or Microsoft. If you say "open Docs", I know it's
| Google and only Google.
|
| This is no different than if the project called itself
| "Word", which would be equally confusing with Microsoft.
|
| Neither Docs nor Word are genericized. They're both totally
| valid trademarks. Which is why naming this project "Docs"
| would be immediately shut down if any private organization
| tried it. And I've never heard of _governments_ infringing
| private trademarks before, so I 'm curious what's going on
| here.
| lioeters wrote:
| Docs and Word are both generic words that need a
| qualification like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Otherwise
| they could be Open Docs or Open Word (not sure if that
| exists, maybe Libre Word?).
|
| Same with Books. It could be Google Books, Facebook, or
| Open Books.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Otherwise they could be Open Docs or Open Word (not
| sure if that exists, maybe Libre Word?)._
|
| No, they couldn't. That's why there _isn 't_ any Open
| Docs or Libre Word word processor.
|
| That's very specifically _why_ it 's Libre _Writer_. Why
| it 's FreeOffice _TextMaker_. Why it 's _FocusWriter_ and
| _Writemonkey_ and whatever else.
|
| A major part of trademark law is likelihood of confusion.
| Both Docs and Word are associated so strongly with Google
| and Microsoft, that a judge is almost certainly going to
| side with them if you try to call your new word processor
| Docs or Word.
| amyjess wrote:
| KWord is a thing, and the only reason it's not still
| under active development is because enthusiasm for
| development dried up after the acrimonious
| KOffice/Calligra split. In fact, it was the only part of
| the KOffice suite that was allowed to keep its name after
| the split.
|
| And there's also AbiWord, which is still under active
| development.
|
| Or speaking of which, all the gazillion office suites
| with Office in the name.
| crazygringo wrote:
| KWord and AbiWord don't use "Word" as a standalone, well,
| word. They're clearly not _Word_. You 're not going to
| confuse them, and that's the point.
|
| And "office" became the term for an office suite, the way
| "calendar" and "contacts" and "word processor" are just
| descriptive terms too.
|
| But "Docs" and "Word" have a clear, obvious
| distinctiveness that "office" and "calendar" don't.
| "Word" and "Docs" don't inherently mean "word processor".
| Heck, OpenDocs.com is for legal forms, not word
| processing.
|
| I really don't know what you're arguing. Go ahead, start
| a word processor named just "[Company name] Word" with
| the space and get sued by Microsoft and lose. You don't
| really think you'll win, do you? This is not a
| controversial or blurry area of trademark law.
| thiht wrote:
| Yeah if you want a strong trademark on your product, don't call
| it "Docs"
| theflash666 wrote:
| isn't "Google Docs" the trademark https://about.google/brand-
| resource-center/trademark-list/ ?
| crazygringo wrote:
| That doesn't matter. It's about similarity and consumer
| confusion.
|
| E.g. you can't launch an ice cream brand called "Haagen" or
| called "Dazs", even though the trademark is for "Haagen-
| Dazs".
| evaneykelen wrote:
| Outline is also open source (or at least "source available"):
| https://github.com/outline/outline
| theflash666 wrote:
| All features aren't available in the community edition ...
| evaneykelen wrote:
| Do you have a reference to the differences? I can't find it
| on their website nor on GitHub.
| theflash666 wrote:
| https://www.getoutline.com/pricing, what missed back in the
| days was the multi-organization management
| ctrlp wrote:
| I just cannot understand the appeal of these browser based note
| taking apps. Notion, Obsidian, Outline? Is it the collaboration
| feature? Why not just use Google Docs or equivalent?
|
| For notes, I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface.
| I just put my notes in a text file. No protocol, just search for
| text strings or text tags. If I need hierarchical organization, I
| use directories. What am I missing out on?
| jonahx wrote:
| > What am I missing out on?
|
| 1. Non-technical colleagues.
|
| 2. Easy and real-time collaboration.
|
| 3. Slickness, mixing of multi-media, etc. This is related to 1.
|
| Not arguing against your preference, just answering the "why".
| staplers wrote:
| I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface.
|
| You can thank work-locked machines removing any app-level
| flexibility. I'm not signing into any google work account on my
| personal phone.
|
| Browser level access allows for multi-device multi-context
| (personal/work) access.
|
| Also google docs/drive is deeply unusable when trying to
| organize mental spaces.
| e12e wrote:
| > I just cannot understand the appeal of these browser based
| note taking apps. Notion, Obsidian, Outline? Is it the
| collaboration feature? Why not just use Google Docs or
| equivalent?
|
| Google docs is also browser based? And obviously not foss or
| self-hostable.
|
| Are you saying "why does Google have docs app in addition to a
| note taking app?" (Google docs vs Google Keep, Microsoft Word
| vs Microsoft OneNote etc?)
| ctrlp wrote:
| I'm saying that there are already collaboration tools like
| Google Docs or whatever. I don't see how managing notes in
| such a tool beats having some text files. Working with a
| browser kind of sucks for write operations. It's fine or even
| good for reading. But writing into a browser goes through
| obscure layers so that, what? it can go into a database?
| Files on disk solve this issue. Grep over files or even a
| more robust index of searchable data solves the findability
| problem. There can be other sidecar tools to support
| discoverability, but I'm just focused on the HCI/UX of a
| browser for text entry and editing, and find it really poor
| compared to a text editor with files that you control and can
| run other tools over.
| Arcuru wrote:
| I am currently in the process of switching from using Obsidian
| to manage local markdown notes/files to using Notion for at
| least my personal project tracking. I have 2 reasons.
|
| 1. Notions "Databases" are easier to use, edit, and manage than
| any similar setup I could figure out locally. And they have
| inbuilt integrations so you can sync things like
| Github/Gitlab/Jira, etc directly into your docs. I highly
| recommend setting up a personal project inside Notion to try it
| out.
|
| 2. Less important but still useful, the collaboration is good
| to use with my partner. We can have shared household
| notes/saved info/tasks/etc all in one place very easily using
| it.
| ezst wrote:
| Have you tried TriliumNext? It doesn't have collaboration for
| editing but sharing is built in,
|
| It lets you structure your notes in a way that's reminiscent
| of object oriented programming (you've got templates to
| define types, inheritance of attributes to instantiate and
| specialize them, etc). I have hierarchies of
| hundreds/thousands of notes that for all intent and purposes
| are as good as Notion's Databases
| mmooss wrote:
| > I don't see the appeal of having a browser interface. I just
| put my notes in a text file.
|
| Great until you need an image or more than the simplest table,
| as examples.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Hmm, I find it easy enough to open a link or even embed an
| image in a text editor.
| mmooss wrote:
| I mean, when one text document gets to long, moving
| sections elsewhere and linking to them.
|
| How do you embed an image? ASCII art?
| maxloh wrote:
| It seems that the editor is supported by ProseMirror.
|
| Kudos for their work!
| YousefED wrote:
| Yep! Docs is using our editor BlockNote
| (https://www.blocknotejs.org) which builds upon Prosemirror
| (and we're also proud to be sponsors of Marijn from Prosemirror
| who's done an amazing job, indeed)
| frenchtoast8 wrote:
| For a while I've been searching for a note taking app that
|
| * Allows more than one user editing the same page at once
|
| * Is accessible on a mobile device (either app or mobile browser)
|
| * Can be at the very least viewed in read only mode if
| disconnected from the internet
|
| The last point is the most important to me and frustratingly has
| been the most elusive for me to find. For now I use Notion with
| the hopes they implement it eventually. I can't consider
| switching to a self hosted alternative without the last point.
| electriclove wrote:
| Apple Notes?
| ryanf wrote:
| Have you seen https://www.craft.do?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Both Google Keep and Google Docs meet your requirements,
| depending on whether you want small notes or big notes.
|
| What's wrong with those?
| MrBra wrote:
| we don't need an FOSS self-hosted alternative to X. We need a
| FOSS alternative to the cloud/hosted model such that there's
| distinction between the two, everything is everywhere for
| everyone, free. Fediverse, but better. But we're not even at
| Fediverse ;)
| sylvinus wrote:
| Hey. A few developers from the team are on HN and will be happy
| to answer any questions here!
|
| We also made a small scratchpad you can use to test collaboration
| features, if it doesn't get too flooded :)
| https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/a3f0becc-f2b7-45be-a5e5-...
| miki123211 wrote:
| What's your stance on accessibility? Is that something you even
| consider?
|
| Notion is particularly terrible here, so this could be a great
| alternative for people / organizations who need that.
| theflash666 wrote:
| https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria is used in most
| La Suite projects. Also we have one frontend developer
| focused on accessibility and few auditors. We always
| prioritize accessibility
| manuhabitela wrote:
| It's not only considered, it's a an actual goal to be 100%
| usable by everyone. It's already the case for some of La
| Suite projects. Not quite there yet right now for some
| others, but it will be.
|
| And I agree, lots of popular, proprietary solutions should do
| better in terms of accessibility. I believe open-source helps
| in that regard, as in many others.
|
| Here in La Suite we have some wcag-geeks in the team and
| regularly include some of our users with disabilities for
| feedback.
| hysan wrote:
| What led to the choice of using Blocknote over other editor
| packages? Would love to read about the decision making and
| comparisons between all the editors you considered. Also
| interested in any other write ups about choosing packages (ex:
| I see you using hocuspocus which I think is from another editor
| - TipTap) and why you landed on your particular tech stack.
| YousefED wrote:
| Maintainer of BlockNote here (and contributor to HocusPocus).
| I can't speak for Docs as to why they chose BlockNote, but
| can answer some of your questions. BlockNote is actually
| built on top of Tiptap - but designed to take away the heavy
| lifting. As powerful as they are, to build a Notion-like
| editor on top of Tiptap (or Prosemirror) still requires quite
| some engineering firepower. We've built BlockNote to come
| "batteries-included" with common UI components and a simpler
| API to make it easy for you to add a modern, block-based
| editor to your app.
| evnp wrote:
| That's very cool, as a happy user of TipTap this is the
| first I've heard of BlockNote - excited to check it out.
| I've also built a few modest things on top of TipTap and
| felt a slight "tower of babel" unease, would you mind
| saying a bit about what BlockNote takes from TipTap which
| couldn't be accomplished with Prosemirror alone?
|
| This comes from a place of pure curiosity, I don't actually
| believe this strata of editor packages is in any way
| inherently bad!
| virdev wrote:
| Hey! Not a developer but here are a couple pointers. As
| Yousef says below, the text editing bit is hard. We wanted to
| be build fast and BlockNotejs makes it easy, you get the
| block stucture, the slash command, you can style your editor
| and extend with custom blocks. The BlockNotejs team
| researched the live editing space thoroughly so we could just
| follow the tracks: BlockNotejs, HocusPocus, Yjs. We "just"
| had to build the wrapper around with authentication, docs
| permissions and search and boom you have Docs!
| npodbielski wrote:
| Looks really nice. I looked at the readme on github and
| selfhost section mentions it is only for testing. Why? What is
| the difference?
| ex3ndr wrote:
| But outline is opensource?
| theflash666 wrote:
| Actually some Outline feature aren't, which could be quite
| limiting when deployed in a large organization or institution
| amai wrote:
| Which format are they using to write/store the notes? Is it
| another Markdown dialect?
| theflash666 wrote:
| It's based on https://www.blocknotejs.org/
| amai wrote:
| And this again is based on prosemirror. So for better math
| support you would have the option of using
| https://benrbray.com/prosemirror-math/ .
| virdev wrote:
| The notes are stored in Y.doc format because we use Yjs for our
| collaboration server. https://docs.yjs.dev/api/y.doc
| cloudking wrote:
| Docmost is another open source option https://www.docmost.com
| noname120 wrote:
| Looks like an amazing alternative to Dropbox Paper
| remark5396 wrote:
| There are already quiet a few softwares that claim to be Notion
| alternatives or seem to be:
|
| - AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
|
| - AFFiNE: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
|
| - SiYuan: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan
|
| - Trillium Next: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
|
| - AnyType (only clients are source available):
| https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts
| ezst wrote:
| Count me as a biiig proponent and user of TriliumNext, it's in
| my mind and experience the most capable note taking and
| organising app there is, but I don't think I nor any of its
| developers would call it a "Notion alternative".
| CountGeek wrote:
| And Docmost - https://github.com/docmost/docmost
| crabmusket wrote:
| https://getoutline.com mentioned in the submission title
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| The future continues to be AGPL
| piokoch wrote:
| "Simple collaborative editing without the formatting complexity
| of markdown"
|
| It is incredible that nowadays Markdown is considered "complex".
| sylvinus wrote:
| Well I think that most of our users have never typed a "["
| character... So for them, Markdown is definitely complex :)
| virdev wrote:
| What's complex for most users that do not spend their days into
| an IDE is not seing what's your prose is going to look like and
| they've been use to that for a couple decade. For us it kind of
| made sense to support markdown + giving giving a minimalistic
| toolbar for users who don't know how to md. Also, you can do a
| lot of things in BlockNotejs you can't unless you code html and
| css in md (colors, blocks etc.)
| virdev wrote:
| 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!
| alephnerd wrote:
| Great work by the Suite Numerique team!
|
| Are you guys looking at adding localization support for
| languages beyond French as well (eg. English, German)?
|
| It would be a great alternative to multiple disjointed OSS
| offerings like Mattermost or Appflowy.
|
| Also, I found the DIPT to be fairly intruiging. How much
| inspiration did the org get from Gov.uk, and are there some
| resources, papers, or books you could point to about the DIPT
| initiative?
| sylvinus wrote:
| Indeed, Docs is already available both in English and German
| :)
|
| AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS
| (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at
| https://beta.gouv.fr/
| virdev wrote:
| Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we
| want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are
| here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added
| turkish tonight ;)
| mkl wrote:
| Do you have plans to add structure to the document collection?
| E.g. group documents into projects, put documents into order
| and hierarchy (docs holding chapters, sections). I would really
| like a system that lets you have projects with a document per
| chapter or section and has a chapter/section outline on the
| left panel of the document editor.
|
| Comments and custom styles would also be great.
| virdev wrote:
| Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of
| the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with
| as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the
| user rights of the parent.
| andyferris wrote:
| Not a Docs question, but I recently came across Grist and I see
| that Grist is actually listed as a project under la Suite
| Numerique. On the other hand, Grist Labs (getgrist.com/about)
| claim to be the developers, are based in the US (NYC), and I
| couldn't see any mention any EU collaboration on their website.
| What is the connection here? How does it differ from the
| governance and funding model of Docs?
|
| I love that you guys are building a suite of next-gen tools
| rather than just recreating LibreOffice. Seems really smart to
| me!
| sylvinus wrote:
| AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the
| French government to the Grist open source repository. We
| also deploy it, we have instances running in various
| government agencies.
|
| For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of
| Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We
| welcome contributions!
| vviers wrote:
| Yes, there are lots of PR listed here :
| https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-
| core/pulls?q=is%3Apr+labe...
| virdev wrote:
| > The French government agency ANCT Donnees et Territoires
| has also made significant contributions to the codebase.
|
| From the Grist-core readme :
| https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core
| u_sama wrote:
| Hi, thanks for the project and contributing a nice European
| alternative to Outline. I had a few questions relating to Docs
| as it seems a nice alternative I want to integrate in our
| company.
|
| - Is it a project funded directly by the Governments or by the
| NGI funds?
|
| - Is there an extensibility via plugins or other in the future
| thought for integrations ?
|
| - Is the ProConnect the only way or can one use a self-hosted
| OIDC or another IdP to login?
| virdev wrote:
| Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the
| governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit)
| received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany
| are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans
| for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the
| project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us
| know if you get it running docs@numerique.gouv.fr would love
| to hear your feedback as a reuser.
| cyberpunkdyst wrote:
| Did you consider building on top of some existing open source
| solutions like Docmost, Appflowy, or AFFiNE?
| virdev wrote:
| Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of
| libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own
| wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to
| iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large
| organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs).
| Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement
| that help the whole collaborative software category.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| 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.
| kalipso wrote:
| Anyone knows if there is something like that with heavy focus on
| privacy? basically decentralized offline first, end2end encrypted
| collaborative note taking/knowledgedb is something iam looking
| for.
| rvense wrote:
| No, but the French and German governments just gave you an
| excellent code base to start from!
| CountGeek wrote:
| A while back this was posted on HN -
| https://github.com/docmost/docmost/
| virdev wrote:
| We plan on getting e2ee as we have the military are interested
| in using it. From what we investigated there will be some
| tradeoff feature wise (attribution of edits will be harder for
| example). Happy to receive some help on that front.
| ldubost wrote:
| For e2ee you might want to have a look at CryptPad
| (https://cryptpad.org). You can test it on the free instance
| https://cryptpad.fr
|
| You'll have plenty of doc types with full end to end
| encryption, including for your drive.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| I've been looking for something like this that also has a
| Whiteboard feature (think Miro) to deploy self-hosted at a small
| business.
|
| It has taken me these places:
|
| Obsidian - has whiteboard, but not collaborative. Sync plugin
| cannot be self hosted. Open source sync doesn't have user
| management.
|
| Affine - ditto. Also not completely open source.
|
| Logseq - ditto. Some text editing features require advanced
| knowledge of databases to use (ie writing query) making it
| difficult to deploy to non-technical staff.
|
| Excalidraw - whiteboards only.
| Pi9h wrote:
| I am building Docmost (Open-source alternative to Confluence
| and Notion).
|
| We have integrated support for Excalidraw, Draw.io and Mermaid
| diagrams; Plus real-time collaboration.
|
| Github: https://github.com/docmost/docmost
| aetherspawn wrote:
| This looks really good.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Great idea, but Django as back-end is a very bad choice.
| janceek wrote:
| No? What makes you think that
| naveed125 wrote:
| Not sure how its different from self hosted outline?
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| Upon reviewing the Docker Compose, I noticed a large number of
| containers. Although this could be seen as negative feedback, I
| view it as a challenge and make time to address it as a self-
| hoster.
| wuming2 wrote:
| The reality is nowadays few documents need desktop publishing
| features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.
|
| Also the average back office author knows a tiny fraction of
| Microsoft Word or Excel features.
|
| Give them means to type in text, add pictures and collaborate.
| Templates for beautification. That's all what is needed.
|
| This has been known for ages. Alas Microsoft has a grip on
| governments and large orgs we know little about. CERN is an
| example.
| mmooss wrote:
| > nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features.
| Because seldom if ever become paper documents.
|
| I rarely read paper, but I find professionally designed
| documents much easier to read on my screens. It's such a relief
| to open a PDF of a professionally designed book, for example,
| after reading screenfuls of html.
| imoreno wrote:
| From the top of the readme:
|
| > without the formatting complexity of markdown
|
| Really, markdown is complicated of all things?
| addcommitpush wrote:
| For non technical people used to WYSIWYG, yes?
| xyst wrote:
| Wonder how good this is at resolving merge conflicts:
|
| > Offline? No problem, keep writing, your edits will get synced
| when back online
|
| Have been burned too many times in college.
|
| person 1: is updating doc
|
| person 2: is updating doc
|
| person 3; updating doc
|
| (( doc reaches a dozen pages ))
|
| person 3 loses internet connection but everyone else continues
| working
|
| Person 3 adds and edits a handful of pages while offline while
| #1, #2 keep chugging along.
|
| #3 internet is restored and now the system attempts to merge in
| their changes and sync changes from #1, #2. At the same time, #1,
| #2 receiving updates from #3
|
| Now chaos ensues as the system is throwing a shit ton of errors
| and old changes getting reverted. Immediate showstopper.
|
| Not so fun times. And a lesson learned.
| kowalej wrote:
| Was just thinking how my team can get off current Notion lock in,
| this looks promising. Might be able to contribute as well, being
| a Django shop.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > Run it locally - Running Docs locally using the methods
| described below is for testing purposes only. It is based on
| building Docs using Minio as the S3 storage solution but you can
| choose any S3 compatible object storage of your choice.
|
| > Prerequisite
|
| > Make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker
| Compose installed on your laptop:
|
| See, this is the issue. If you want adoption, you can't assume
| that users are familiar with this.
|
| You should start with a dmg for Mac users.
| photonios wrote:
| I love that this is funded by the French&German government. Go
| Europe! Wonderful to see. My only wish is that other EU
| governments (my own included) would invest even more into
| projects like this.
| virdev wrote:
| Hey! The Netherlands joined recently. Let's hope more countries
| follow
| Johnson8053 wrote:
| personally prefer affine.pro. selfhosted is enough for me
| piokoch wrote:
| That's a nice shot, that probably is not going to change much.
| This is a neat alternative for Notion if you are small company,
| but with strong IT team that will maintain installation (all the
| boring stuff from updates to backups).
|
| If you are 20 person startup then Notion will cost you around 200
| Euro per month. Having Docs installation will be cheaper? Will
| 200 Euros cover the expenses? I am afraid the math is not on the
| Docs side.
|
| First question that any bigger organization will ask is: how SSO
| will work, what is the integration with our company LDAP, etc. If
| they hear that well, install Docs for yourself and figure out
| integration by yourself no manager would agree to use Docs, as
| from his or her perspective it is cheaper, less risky to go with
| something like Notion. It is also true even with gov
| administration or public universities, they also operate within
| IT infrastructure and they gladly take something free, but it
| must integrate with that IT infrastructure. If not, this is not
| an option.
| virdev wrote:
| Hey there! Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with you.
| For government and large legs it makes less and less sense to
| just pay for licences. If you pay per user it becomes a huge
| chunk of your budget AND you have no control on your IT nor the
| budget to hire people. In the context we live and especially in
| Europe it also make no sense to opt for an American vendor who
| has to give access to US gov if asked to. And for small orgs I
| don't see why there'd be no large mutualized instance that
| everyone can use for a reasonable price that pays for the ops
| team running it + server expenses.
| samtuke wrote:
| Love the concept, but if the core developers don't rely on direct
| relationships with non-government customers, then I assume this
| software is unlikely to meet my needs as a startup founder (or
| the need of most other readers here on HN).
|
| Governments make perverse customers with needs and incentives
| that don't align with other regular users and customers, in my
| experience. So the lack of a paid hosted version of Docs is
| concerning to me in terms of their priorities, quality, and the
| future product focus of this otherwise promising (and much
| needed) app.
|
| Tldr: being customer-focused and having a product led
| organizational culture is unlikely if you're building for
| government.
| shyang wrote:
| There is also HedgeDoc (https://hedgedoc.org/). I found it useful
| for (1) collaboration, and (2) being able to write in the
| Markdown syntax w/ side-by-side rendering. (Discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31645045)
| bzg wrote:
| For more Free Software developed within the French public sector,
| check https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome
| progx wrote:
| Dark mode?
| rayrrr wrote:
| For my data engineers, some similes: basic note taking apps like
| Joplin are like a data warehouse. Notion is like a data lake.
| What we need is something like a data lakehouse. Hopefully this
| might be it.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Obsidian! It's a lot cheaper than databricks.
| m4l1c3 wrote:
| C'est cool ca comme projet!
|
| - Pas mal non? c'est Francais! :)
| blacklight wrote:
| This got me genuinely interested - until I cloned the project and
| saw the docker-compose file.
|
| Minio + Celery + 4-5 services just for the main app + Keycloak?
|
| I'm sorry, but this isn't something that "anyone can run".
|
| This is something that requires a beefy server and someone who
| can manage microservice architectures with 10+ services.
|
| I'm not sure why all of those services are requirements for the
| app.
|
| I don't know why you need an S3 provider and a federated identity
| manager to run something that looks like Notion.
|
| I don't know why you need to split the app into 5 microservices.
|
| And I honestly don't think that all of this overhead is needed.
|
| I'll give Docs another look if it decides to trim some of this
| bloatware.
| foundzen wrote:
| why everyone ends up using yjs as their choice of CRDT framework.
| aren't there better alternative or it is just following the
| popular choice?
| dcchambers wrote:
| > Offline? No problem, keep writing, your edits will get synced
| when back online
|
| I'm sold.
| TheDong wrote:
| Anyone know the system requirements?
|
| I got bit by notion when I assumed my recent i7 would be enough
| for it to keep up with my typing speed, but after a few pages of
| notes, notion uses 100% of a core and input lags considerably....
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