Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

https://www.focalboard.com/

by stanislavb • 5 years ago

694 174 5 years ago

1cvmask• 5 years ago

Looks cool. But you have split up the licenses as Apache and AGPL. Why the split? You could prevent the likes of AWS competition with a blanket AGPL etc... Am I missing something? Or is Apache license OSS some derivative work and from another project?

jdc• 5 years ago

Maybe it's a means of last resort to prevent the work from effectively going to waste in case of bankruptcy/low adoption?

paxys5• 5 years ago

From what I can understand, if you host Focalboard on your server and update some configurations and templates to suit your needs, you are not required to open source these updates (which you would otherwise have to under AGPL) since those specific files are Apache 2.0 licensed.

2Gkashmiri• 5 years ago

i think AGPL only makes that requirement if you give out YOUR version to users. If you are just using for yourself or internal team, AGPL does not require you to publish those changes.

AnonHP• 5 years ago

It would’ve been more convenient to me if this project provided standalone downloads for macOS and Windows. The current downloads for the Desktop version are only available through the respective app stores on these two platforms.

pbreit• 5 years ago

Downloading from app store is about as easy as it gets.

paxys5• 5 years ago

I take it you have never tried using the Windows Store.

eps2• 5 years ago

No, it's not.

Requires a sign-up and comes with other cruft unrelated to the actual download.

sneak5• 5 years ago

It's a major bummer when devs don't even let you download the app from their own website, instead suggesting that you dox yourself to Apple to use their software. :(

Mattermost (the company behind this) also builds spyware into Mattermost (which is not well documented) and I would be unsurprised to find the same nonsense going on with this.

Is there a term for companies that are "open source in license only" that ignore all of the values of the free software community?

If you download the app store version, and you edit the source code of the downloaded app to, say, scratch an itch, it will not run any longer because the app bundle signature verification will fail. Distributing unmodifiable applications defeats the whole purpose of a free software license.

manigandham2• 5 years ago

Did you check the repo? You can download and build your own app easily, they have instructions for all 3 platforms:

https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard#building-and-runnin...

manigandham2• 5 years ago

https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard#building-and-runnin...

thepra• 5 years ago

Same here, I don't want to use any Microsoft account on windows 10, I was already burned by it once ._.

murermader• 5 years ago

You don‘t need a Microsoft account to download from the Microsoft Store.

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here. Thanks for the feedback! Opened feature idea ticket on this here: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/99

nickysielicki• 5 years ago

It's easy to miss that this is by the same people making Mattermost, the open-source self-hosted slack alternative you might have heard of.

https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard

rtpg• 5 years ago

Yeah this seems like a pretty serious initiative, kind of surprised they're not offering their own hosting though.

unixhero• 5 years ago

It's pretty obvious they are planning that. I read through the license and it's mostly AGPL and MIT, but its top level is a MATTERMOST-license.

Anyways, good on them for sharing the code.

Reventlov• 5 years ago

So should we expect them to roll out some community edition lacking essential features to kind of force people to use the (paying, closed-source) entreprise edition ?

Some basic features have been wanted for years in the mattermost CE edition, while being implemented in the EE edition, like the capability to prevent users to kick other users from channels ( https://forum.mattermost.org/t/users-can-kick-other-users-of... ).

andrewSC• 5 years ago

The one I got bit by yesterday was team-edition not offering basic HA/cluster functionality. Oh well, vertical scaling here I come! Also, i’m not sure if the helm chart is officially maintained or a community-only effort, however, I’d love to see the addition of being able to configure/use imagePullSecrets. Also, general fixes to the values yaml.

CodeMage• 5 years ago

I'm curious about something: would there be any hidden gotchas involved if someone forked the Mattermost repo, and added features like that? I understand not wanting to spend the effort on implementing and maintaining these changes, I'm just trying to figure out if there's any other reason for not doing it. From what I can see, the license is APL 2.0, which I think shouldn't forbid that, but IANAL (or expert on working in open source).

s__s• 5 years ago

The cool thing about open source is you can add any feature you want yourself.

Aeolun4• 5 years ago

This would be easier to test out if I could just run a docker image instead of doing a whole nginx configuration.

igetspam• 5 years ago

What's stopping you? Run nginx in a container and mount the config dir as a volume.

[EDIT] Someone did it already: https://github.com/PaperStork/focalboard/pull/1/commits/6452...

aidenn02• 5 years ago

nginx? I did the following and it ran just fine:

  make webapp
  make
  bin/focalboard-server

Aeolun4• 5 years ago

The server installation instructions start with configuring nginx to do something. That’s where I bounced.

qbasic_forever• 5 years ago

Yeah the server install instructions are a bit out of date it seems. It doesn't mention you need to run the 'make webapp' task to run webpack and generate the bundled HTML page. It also has you download an old version (0.5) and the docs on the config don't match what's in the repo now (with version 0.6.1).

Anyways, here's a Dockerfile I whipped up that builds and runs a local version configured to use sqlite. No nginx or other stuff, it's just simple localhost config (not production ready):

  # Focalboard v0.6.1 requires node 10+
  FROM node:15-buster-slim
  
  # Focalboard source to clone.
  ARG FOCALBOARD_REPO="https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard.git"
  ARG FOCALBOARD_BRANCH="v0.6.1"
  
  # Focalboard v0.6.1 requires make.
  RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
        gcc \
        git \
        make \
  &&  rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
  
  # Focalboard v0.6.1 requires go 1.15+
  COPY --from=golang:1.16-buster /usr/local/go /usr/local/go
  ENV PATH="/usr/local/go/bin:$PATH"
  
  # Clone focalboard.
  WORKDIR /opt/focalboard
  RUN git clone --depth 1 --branch $FOCALBOARD_BRANCH $FOCALBOARD_REPO .
  
  # Build focalboard.
  RUN make prebuild \
  &&  make webapp \
  &&  make
  
  # Setup a localhost configuration with sqlite.
  RUN echo '{\
    "serverRoot": "http://localhost:8000",\n\
    "port": 8000,\n\
    "dbtype": "sqlite3",\n\
    "dbconfig": "/data/focalboard.db",\n\
    "useSSL": false,\n\
    "webpath": "./webapp/pack",\n\
    "filespath": "/files",\n\
    "telemetry": true,\n\
    "session_expire_time": 2592000,\n\
    "session_refresh_time": 18000,\n\
    "localOnly": false,\n\
    "enableLocalMode": true,\n\
    "localModeSocketLocation": "/var/tmp/focalboard_local.socket"\n\
  }' > /opt/focalboard/config.json
  
  # Uploaded files are stored here.
  VOLUME /files
  
  # Sqlite database is stored here.
  VOLUME /data
  
  CMD ["/opt/focalboard/bin/focalboard-server"]

It will need a volume at /files for uploaded file storage, and /data for its sqlite database. It exposes a server on port 8000, and an admin API unix socket on /var/tmp/focalboard_local.socket (read their docs for what it's useful for, like resetting passwords). The Dockerfile should be multiarch, but I can only test on amd64. Low spec hardware (raspberry pi) might struggle a bit with the build as it's a non-trivial go server build, and then production webpack bundle... weird failures might be OOM issues.

Here's an example of a basic build and run, saving the files and db to a local directory:

  <copy Dockerfile contents above to file>
  docker build -t focalboard .
  docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 -v $PWD/files:/files -v $PWD/data:/data focalboard

Access http://localhost:8000 and it will let you create a new user account.

(go wild with the Dockerfile above, I release it in public domain)

hpen• 5 years ago

Ha I have an open source Trello alternative called kanception.io or https://github.com/hpennington/kanception

mandiantBob• 5 years ago

I just downloaded and tested the standalone desktop app. It has a very pretty and responsive interface compared to Kanboard.

I have been self hosting Kanboard on my rpi for my own work, and I think that Kanboard still has many 'poweruser' features that Focalboard is missing.

If there is an easy way for me to migrate my Kanboard data over to Focalboard, I would definitely give it a shot as a daily driver.

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here, thanks for the idea!

Added an enhancement ticket for this: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/95

Open to other feedback as well! https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/wiki/Share-your-fee...!

Brendinooo2• 5 years ago

Nice. I was using Wekan for awhile until I ignored Heroku telling me that they were getting rid of the free MongoDB service, then I lost all of my data. Maybe I'll have to try this instead.

selcuka• 5 years ago

Can't you use MongoDB Atlas free tier?

https://www.mongodb.com/pricing

Brendinooo2• 5 years ago

Perhaps, but my data's already gone.

johnx123-up3• 5 years ago

Restyaboard is having import option for other software including Wekan. So, you may easily migrate from Wekan to Restyaboard to avoid that.

jasonjayr• 5 years ago

In the same category as 'self-hosted trello', I found "Planka" not to long ago, and as a self-hosted trello/kanban/todo board, it was pretty easy to boot up and has worked for my simple purposes for the last few months....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24812900

avinassh• 5 years ago

Would it be nice if it was possible to import existing data from Trello and Notion

deftnerd• 5 years ago

They have scripts to import from Asana, Notion, and Trello https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/tree/main/import

sali0• 5 years ago

This is awesome. This with good integration with Mattermost (or discord) would serve the needs for a lot of teams. Notion could as well but they are a slow moving beast with different priorities.

orthoxerox• 5 years ago

I would be surprised if it doesn't integrate natively with Mattermost, given that it's made by the same company.

yumraj2• 5 years ago

I wonder why the Mac OS desktop app requires 10.15? I'm assuming it's just an electron app.

mynegation• 5 years ago

Not sure about version requirement but you can find that Mac app is written in Swift: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/tree/main/mac and Windows application in C# uses WPF: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/tree/main/win-wpf

Linux app seems to be just a local server supposedly with web browser as an interface.

yumraj2• 5 years ago

Yes, github repo also mentions Catalina (10.15) and XCode 12+.

So, Swift would explain that..

yblu• 5 years ago

Both these apps contain a few source files and all they do seem to be rendering and handling a webview. The "real" app seems to be this: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/tree/main/webapp.

mraza0073• 5 years ago

I’m just surprised few weeks ago i was looking at self hosted notion/trello like alternatives and now I just came across this.

The project just looks really cool and I’m definitely going to download and try this.

I just wanted to thank the developers from the bottom of my heart for creating this.

Lastly I’m just curious is it possible to host this on a raspberry pi

aidenn02• 5 years ago

Looks like this needs Go, Webpack and an SQL server (with sqlite3 being the out-of-the-box default). That all should run on the RPI.

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here, thank you so much for the recognition!

We're working super hard to build something that benefits our community.

While there's not formal support for Raspberry Pi right now, we'd welcome a the feature idea, here's more on how to share feedback: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/wiki/Share-your-fee...!

mraza0073• 5 years ago

hey man, thanks for replying I loved the product and I would love to try it out on raspberry pi and I will add that as a feature request

mraza0073• 5 years ago

hey I finally have a instance of Focalboard https://twitter.com/muhammad_o7/status/1372781058995806210?s...

orliesaurus• 5 years ago

I love Notion but the speed, or rather lack of, is killing me daily. Last Friday I was taking some notes, and suddenly the page refreshed and everything was gone. Went on twitter to see, I wasn't alone .. i feel like hosting my own notion clone is the way to go forward to use Notion...

movedx2• 5 years ago

I've actually just started using Notion and the UI is nice, as is the feature set, but yeah, I'm getting a little annoyed by the constant page loads.

I mean this kind of thing continues to fuel my beliefs that software is going backwards here because frankly, how hard can it be to render some text?

jfim• 5 years ago

how hard can it be to render some text?

It really depends. If the only thing you care about rendering is US ASCII with a monospace bitmapped font, that's not too hard.

However, a general purpose text renderer will have to handle things like directionality (left to right versus right to left text orientation), wide/half text rendering (for CJK characters), combining characters (for some European, South East Asian languages, and zalgo), line break rules (handling characters like soft hyphens and non breaking spaces), and so on.

On the font rendering side of things, there's kerning (some letters are closer to one another), font ligatures (certain fonts handle things like fi ffi fl ffl differently, not to mention things like hasklig), antialiasing, sub pixel rendering, and the fact that fonts are actually programs running on a stack based virtual machine [0].

That's also ignoring more advanced text rendering features like ruby characters and vertical text rendering. Or that apparently Turkish has different small caps than English ones [1].

In practice, it's probably not the text rendering that's the issue, it's probably just features that are implemented inefficiently.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/...

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/tt...

scq• 5 years ago

I'm sure it was a lot snappier when I started using it, but it has been getting quite slow over the past couple of years.

Really makes me want a lightweight alternative because I love its editing model.

tibu• 5 years ago

Same here. And I still did not find the perfect note taking app. I have so few requirements. WYSIWYG editing, easy image insertion, export function with open standard format, mobile app, some security.

hardwaresofton• 5 years ago

Have you tried Joplin? I switched to it and have been loving it. Planning on launching a backup service for it this week actually (Backups +/- encryption to OneDrive, Dropbox, AWS S3 and WebDAV support are all built in):

https://joplinapp.org/

rayiner3• 5 years ago

Try moo.do

smusamashah• 5 years ago

Typora is best WYSIWYG Markdown app

gala8y3• 5 years ago

I recently moved (almost) all of my note taking into Obsidian [0]. They just released a closed beta mobile app (they are very active in development and great community), but they are local first app.

[0] https://obsidian.md

edit: To clarify, using they mobile app will require paid subscription in all scenarios, I think (not sure, as I don't need that).

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here.

You can try the "Focalboard Personal Desktop" to run locally where your performance won't be affected by other users.

We made it available in Windows Store and Apple AppStore to make it easy to try out.

This is just a v0.6 right now, and we would love bug reports and enhancement ideas.

It's the early days of the project and we are excited to hear input: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues

qwerty4561272• 5 years ago

We made it available in Windows Store and Apple AppStore to make it easy to try out.

I would prefer a simple non-store app, a portable app perhaps. Can I get a classic zip/whatever?

KitDuncan• 5 years ago

I am not sure Focalboard has the features you are looking for, but outline wiki is a cool notion like wiki and pretty fast.

raggi• 5 years ago

The licensing notions in this project are nonsense.

paxys5• 5 years ago

I need to hire a lawyer just to figure out if I can use this thing or not. The opening of https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/main/LICENSE.t... mentions 4 separate licenses.

And is it just me or does this part mean absolutely nothing:

We promise that we will not enforce the copyleft provisions in AGPL v3.0 against you if your application (a) does not link to Focalboard directly, but exclusively uses Focalboard's Admin Tools and Configuration Files, and (b) you have not modified, added to or adapted the source code of Focalboard in a way that results in the creation of a “modified version” or “work based on” Focalboard as these terms are defined in the AGPL v3.0 license.

em-bee2• 5 years ago

doesn't (a) mean the admintools should not be under the AGPL? i wonder why they couldn't just specify an appropriate license instead.

and does (b) mean that when i host focalboard myself, i would be allowed to hide the fact from my users?

what other benefit is there from not enforcing the AGPL against me?

if the AGPL is in applied to the unmodified version, then my users would get the original source and whether they got it from me or from upstream. so i don't see the benefit of nonenforcement

dybber• 5 years ago

So it’s like: MIT for compiled application, AGPL if you build it yourself, or you can pay for less strict licensing. Seems similar to the model used e.g. by Qt

https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/main/LICENSE.t...

EDIT: Use of dual licensing for open source software was previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677481

squeaky-clean• 5 years ago

"We promise that we will not enforce the copyleft provisions in AGPL v3.0 against you if [....]"

Does a promise like this actually stand up in a license file / in court? Is this sentence actually meaningful?

paxys5• 5 years ago

That whole paragraph is pretty nonsensical. To me it sounds like "we promise not to enforce this license if you comply with the license".

eps2• 5 years ago

Download Focalboard from the Microsoft App Store.

I am life-long Windows user and I am yet to meet someone who uses Microsoft App Store. A standalone regular installer is an absolute must.

The_rationalist• 5 years ago

Nonsense, package managers enable trivial and fine grained update policies

nightowl_games• 5 years ago

They didn't say anything about the quality of the service, they mentioned the low popularity.

mjthompson• 5 years ago

You might want to add a qualifier to 'package managers', like 'good package managers'... which the Windows Store is not. It barely fits the bill as a package manager.

zeusly• 5 years ago

I use it, and I've bought apps worth ~$200 on it.

btgeekboy• 5 years ago

Hi! I've used it for a few things, such as purchasing Microsoft Flight Simulator, and various WSL distros.

zaptheimpaler• 5 years ago

Its not very popular yet, but its 100% the future. I use it whenever an app is available on the store - easy, consistent auto updates is much better than each app nagging you to update independently. Better for devs as well because it gives you much more confidence that new versions will be adopted quickly.

jerrygoyal• 5 years ago

I prefer it actually.. main reason is streamlined app auto updates

kuschku2• 5 years ago

I download all KDE apps (Kate, Kile, Okular, Krita, etc) from the store, if possible. The one big issue I discovered with that is that store apps can’t be set as default to open a file for a file format that the app didn’t specify itself (e.g., you can’t open an .NFO per default with Kate, as Kate doesn’t register itself as file handler for .NFO files)

aitchnyu• 5 years ago

Krita earned an estimated $4850 from Microsoft App Store vs $2000 in donations and finally allowed a full time maintainer, per this 2018 article https://krita.org/en/item/krita-in-the-windows-store-an-upda...

sprkwd• 5 years ago

I've used it to get Minecraft.

kissgyorgy• 5 years ago

I became a Windows user recently and I install everything I can from the Microsoft Store, so I don't have to individually and manually get updates for all the apps I installed.

curryst2• 5 years ago

Just FYI, there are several CLI tools that more closely resemble a Linux package manager that you can use. Scoop and chocolatey come to mind (I'm a scoop user myself). I think NuGet is supposed to be a CLI software repo tool by Microsoft, but I'm only tangentially aware of it so I might have that wrong.

I mostly dislike the Microsoft Store because it requires an account, even for free downloads. I'm a little loathe to hand Microsoft control over a higher layer of my stack, for fear that they do some kind of "you can't control when you patch" thing like they did with Windows. I've also got a little bit of leftover disdain because it used to basically only have Metro apps, which were awful. That's not a good reason, but I won't lie and say it doesn't exist.

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here,

Hi @eps, I've opened a ticket on this: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/99

Would you be open to giving a "Thumbs Up" and/or a comment sharing more about the benefits?

Community feedback is super important, and we would love to hear more from you and others

jpambrun• 5 years ago

Most importantly, while I have admin privileges and can install some software, my corporate machine has the windows store disabled.

unsungNovelty4• 5 years ago

https://www.openproject.org/

I am always surprised when people don't mention Open Project. Cos isn't this fragmentation? Open Project...

- Have been there for a long time.

- Good motivated team AFAIK,

- Have forum software.

- Project board

- And even version control!

Everything self hosted or enterprise/cloud for serious stuff or people who want to support them.

Or is there some other reason why openproject is not known? Would love to hear more from the HN community on this.

petecooper• 5 years ago

Big fan and active user of OpenProject here, I recommend it.

rayiner3• 5 years ago

It’s quite heavy and slow.

unsungNovelty4• 5 years ago

Hey, curious. What exactly do you use from Open Project?

Would love to hear a better definition of "heavy". :)

NotPavlovsDog• 5 years ago

Seconded. For reference, have multiple websites with 10K to 100K visitors monthly on a DO droplet, with a wiki and a dynamic blog working just fine.

Trying this project out made it quite slow and not practical, would need a beefier machine / setup. I decided not to invest time in testing it further, but it may work for others.

Jnr3• 5 years ago

I wish someone would make a modern project management system that was not working against the user all the time.

I use Jira heavily in different projects and I am baffled at how slow it is. Such a popular product but the user experience due to frontend slowness is terrible.

4lun2• 5 years ago

I tried a bunch of selfhosted alternatives to Trello a few months back and never registered OpenProject as an option.

I mainly used this list https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#tas...

I did focus on "Task management/To-do lists", while OpenProject is listed under the "Project Management" section. This is likely why I missed it as I've been looking for something clean and simple (not JIRA) that is more akin to the earlier versions of Trello (rather than the feature bloated whale it has now become).

Looking at it now and to be honest it doesn't quite look like what I'm looking for when looking for a Trello alternative, I just want cards on a board I can move around (with a bit of metadata)

gala8y3• 5 years ago

I just want cards on a board I can move around (with a bit of metadata)

If I may, what did you finally settle on?

input_sh2• 5 years ago

I just want cards on a board I can move around (with a bit of metadata)

Yeah you won't find that in OpenProject. I mean, they do have kanban boards, but they're in an enterprise version that I'm assuming you're not interested at.

AstroJetson• 5 years ago

I use and like https://nullboard.io/preview nullboard which runs in the browser. Because it uses local data, you need to save it or the data is lost when you close the browser window.

JeremyNT• 5 years ago

Another thing on that list that is easy to pass over is gitlab. The community edition is slowly but steadily adding more project management features, one of which is the "issue boards" - a kanban style issue view [0].

I feel like people may overlook gitlab when evaluating this sort of product because they think of it as "just" a git hosting solution, or because they assume that PM type features might all be paywalled. I'm sure real power users will find it lacking, but for simple workflows it does the job very well, and it ticks so many boxes in one solution.

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html

margor• 5 years ago

Last time I used it, it was generally a good experience, albeit slow sometimes when moving/editing stuff around but amount of features it offers even on free plan in my opinion compensates that. Also API is rather easy to use. I'm also surprised it doesn't get so much exposure, alongside https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

Jnr3• 5 years ago

On the licensing page of Open Project 'agile boards' is one of the paid features, so I don't see how it is relevant in this case.

Screenshots look good and it is nice to see that they have figured out a good business model for open source software.

But I don't like to see that 2FA is available only in the paid version still in 2021. Security should be at the core of these kinds of systems.

And I hope that maintaining it is much easier than other Ruby projects that I have encountered in the past. For example, I used to run Redmine project management system, and maintaining it up to date was painful due to fragmentation and differences between Ruby versions. Hopefully Docker and better migration scripts have solved those problems nowadays. Still, even with containerization available, when it comes to self hosted solutions I definitely prefer ones that get compiled to nice binaries. Go, Rust, C, etc.

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here, thanks for the comment!

We weren't aware of Open Project previously, and we're glad to hear about it.

I think you're right, Focalboard is a lot earlier than Open Project, and it doesn't have as many features.

Focalboard was starting during the Mattermost 2020 Hacktoberfest last year: https://mattermost.com/blog/hacktoberfest-2020-recap/

It's in the early stages of development, only v0.6 right now: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/main/CHANGELOG...

That said, we're working on it constantly and excited about its future.

Of the features Open Project has now, are there one or two top priorities you'd suggest we consider adding to Focalboard?

We'd love to hear any feedback, feature suggestions or bug reports: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/wiki/Share-your-fee...!

unsungNovelty4• 5 years ago

Thanks for replying Focalboard team!

I would say, if 2FA is not already available, 2FA! This is the biggest bumper when I have to choose Open project.

Also, Appimage or Flatpak would be great for easier installation for Linux users. Please don't publish ONLY to snapstore if you're planning. Snap might be good for the Mattermost, but the users dread it and each snap adds boot time to the user's machine which is why I stopped using it. Please add a flatpak or appimage if you plan to add it as snap in snapstore! :)

blowski3• 5 years ago

What's the problem with fragmentation? I guess you're thinking of wasted effort, split mindshare amongst users.

But for me, fragmentation is one of the key benefits of open source. Let thousands of alternatives bloom!

alpaca128• 5 years ago

Absolutely. I have grown to dislike this often repeated "don't reinvent the wheel" stance. After some thought you realise 100% of mastering any art is based on imitating and rebuilding existing achievements, because that gives us the basis for aiming even higher with our own ideas.

When we blindly copy our own "Hello World" program into a text file nobody bats an eye. When a group of musicians play a metal song on classical instruments it's called a cover. But when someone builds their own database to have some fun and get better in-depth understanding of the tech you will always find someone whining about the not-invented-here-syndrome.

Effort isn't wasted just because it didn't change the world.

tfehring• 5 years ago

Also confusion and decision paralysis for new users, as well as limiting new features to only a subset of users unless someone takes the time to re-implement them. And lots of FOSS projects end up as abandonware, and consolidation can increase the share of users whose software is actively maintained. Split mindshare is also a big deal for applications with strong network effects, though probably not for something like this.

ta988• 5 years ago

Agreed OpenProject is impressive. I used it for myself for a time. Then switched back to OrgMode. But if I come to manage a team with several projects I would clearly use that.

say_it_as_it_is• 5 years ago

When has the fragmentation argument ever prevailed, in the history of technology? New flavors of practically everything, down to bare metal, release daily. The world may agree on communication protocols, but even that is nearly impossible to do together.

pagutierrezn• 5 years ago

It looks like a forked non-free version of redmine but with less flexibility https://www.redmine.org/

rhodozelia• 5 years ago

I’ve been using redmine for project management for a decade. It is reliably excellent.

sneak5• 5 years ago

Note: this, although self-hosted, appears to transmit your usage data without consent (just like the selfhosted Mattermost server from the same people):

https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/main/server/se...

Anyone want to offer me odds on the likelihood of a patch removing this spyware getting accepted by the maintainer in this “open source” project?

fimdomeio• 5 years ago

Apparently there's a config option to turn off telemetry. https://www.focalboard.com/guide/admin/

While I understand the feeling, it's also truth that these kinds of projects appear to receive a lot more criticism than if they went completely closed source which feels a bit unfair.

sneak5• 5 years ago

Apparently there's a config option to turn off telemetry.

The option should be to turn it on; automatically "opting users in" (a euphemism; really, it's assuming consent which does not exist) to spyware is at best unethical and in some jurisdictions actually illegal.

Co-opting a user's own hardware and connection to (silently!) spy on them is a total dickhead move whether your product is free software or proprietary.

Aeolun4• 5 years ago

Every single time someone asks me if they can turn on telemetry I’m perfectly ok with it. But if they default to on I know what I’m dealing with and I don’t want them to have it.

bluefirebrand• 5 years ago

Thank you for posting this.

I was very interested in this. There's no way I'm using it now. I'll never trust anything from Mattermost.

Maybe it still counts as open source but with this, plus their complex licensing, I feel it runs very counter to what the FOSS community actually wants

aquir• 5 years ago

I am using Atlassian's free plans for Jira, Confluence and Service Management. They are great!

johnx123-up3• 5 years ago

FWIW, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25590846

kogepathic• 5 years ago

The installation instructions for the server install don't seem to work.

wget https://releases.mattermost.com/focalboard/0.5.0/focalboard-...
tar -xvzf focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz

The file is actually a zip with the tar.gz inside:

focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

$ unzip -l focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz

Archive: focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz

Length Date Time Name

--------- ---------- ----- ----

12461347 02-02-2021 00:38 focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz

-------- -------

12461347 1 files

Running tar directly (as written in the instructions) will fail with:

$ tar -tzvf focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz

tar: invalid magic

tar: short read

It seems like there's something unintentionally producing a zip at the end of the build process.

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here,

Hi @kogepathic, sorry about that, adding your report as a ticket here: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/94

Aeolun4• 5 years ago

It’s impressive they knew of this (original bug is 20hr old) but still decided to go ahead and post on HN.

cyberlurker• 5 years ago

Thank you, I was trying to figure this out.

mosselman• 5 years ago

Deleting a board is possible, but there is no confirm and no way to restore. Very dangerous!

bachmeier• 5 years ago

Only for people that make mistakes.

johnx123-up3• 5 years ago

FWIW, more alternatives are listed here https://alternativeshub.gitlab.io/kanban-board/ with comparison ranking. IIRC, they're sourced from the awesome list

diacritica3• 5 years ago

A pity that website looks very outdated.

riho2• 5 years ago

Welp.

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here.

Hi @riho, thanks for your feedback. One key piece of feedback we've heard is that other SaaS-based project management tools can run slow.

Because of this, one concept we're testing out is "Focalboard Personal Desktop" where you can run the software locally.

You can download the v0.6 version from the Windows Store or Apple AppStore to try it out. We would love your feedback.

Also, if you're interested in influencing the project, please consider submitting a ticket with type `enhancement` with what you'd like to see: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues

riho2• 5 years ago

That's fair enough, "x, but actually fast" is definitely a strong selling point and a differentiator in my book. That wasn't mentioned on the landing page.

s_dev• 5 years ago

Focal is the Irish for 'word'.

Is that the etymology? 'Wordboard'?

CRConrad• 5 years ago

It's also the English for ~"having, being in, or related to focus". So a meaning of "a board where important tasks are in focus" (or some such) seems at least as likely.

curryst2• 5 years ago

I think they mean it as the adjective form of the English word "focus", as in "focal point". Instead of "focal point" it's a "focal board".

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here!

Huge thanks to everyone who's sharing feedback and comments. It is super exciting to be trending on HackerNews!

We've just put up a new Wiki page for people to share feature ideas, to join our Discourse forum, and to report bugs: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/wiki/Share-your-fee...!

Thank y'all so much for being interested in our project and our space!

We've been working super hard to make something people love, and we'll continue to do so with your input and ideas!

adontz• 5 years ago

I have posted an enhancement https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/103 But cannot attach labels :-(

it3314• 5 years ago

Whoops, updating instructions: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/wiki/Share-your-fee...!

Now asking folks to add `Enhancement:` prefix on tickets, and we can label after

qorrect• 5 years ago

Thanks I love it!

_bz2r• 5 years ago

Can you respond to the point made by Sneak downthread that there is silent data transfer to your company in the background?

square_square• 5 years ago

Is it OK to just copy the UX/UI from notion?

zze• 5 years ago

A good self-hosted alternative is https://kanbantool.com/kanban-tool-on-site - it launched back in 2009, has time tracking and allows for a lot of customization through SDK.

mkrishnan• 5 years ago

seems like a good tool but docker version would be nice.

cooperadymas• 5 years ago

I have not significantly used Notion, but this isn't really a replacement for it is it?

Notion seems to be focused on wiki and notes, with built in structured data allowing you to setup things like boards and task lists.

This seems to just be the boards and task lists without the free form notes and wiki? It pretty clearly replaces Trello and Asana. Notion seems like a stretch from the 5 minutes I poked around in it.

gpas• 5 years ago

I see it as a "faster" altrrnative to the kanban widget in Notion, clearly not a replacement. I use Notion to collect bookmarks, quotes, code, media, every bit of information I need for a project and despite its relative slowness and the lack of offline mode is serving me well.

thnok• 5 years ago

This looks pretty cool! Any chance of seeing a demo? Also do you have any recommended specs for self hosting?

qwerty4561272• 5 years ago

Do you offer hosted service? Is there a demo to try it without installing/subscribing?

fangorn• 5 years ago

Just one letter changes and this whole project goes to sh*t.

ganessh• 5 years ago

This looks great! Can we have a docker image or instruction?

it3314• 5 years ago

Focalboard team here, please see: https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/96

Focalboard – a self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana

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