Tree.io – Open Source Business Management Software

by X4 • 13 years ago

197 55 13 years ago

exceptione• 13 years ago

It looks to be a feature-rich tool. Does anyone know why development has stopped 9 months ago? At least, I conclude so from the github commit history.

glibgil2• 13 years ago

Always use the graph to see what is happening across all branches and tags. https://github.com/treeio/treeio/network

hatsix• 13 years ago

0 commits on master and 0 bugs fixed in 9 months, a handful of commits by a user who branched off of master a couple months ago (and no PRs)... I think it's safe to say that that the 'public' version has been dormant for 9 months.

obituary_latte2• 13 years ago

Am I reading it wrong or do the website and repo licenses not match?

rbanffy• 13 years ago

The site says "free open source" and the repo has a BSD-ish license in it. Where did you find the conflicting info?

obituary_latte2• 13 years ago

http://tree.io/en/download says Creative Commons but in the repo .README it says MIT.

hardwaresofton2• 13 years ago

I think the model might be a little bit misguided (having everything in one place is not necessarily a good thing, specialization and all) -- but open source and awesome? I'm down with that

drone• 13 years ago

Agreed, although there are more capable ERP systems out there of varying degrees of openness, I've found many of them suffer from one serious core flaw (for my needs):

Failure to integrate effectively with Quickbooks or QBO (the latter being more likely for most ERP-like systems these days). I understand that some businesses need fewer advanced financial features, but every promise of "integrated one-stop back-end" has left me with having to have multiple processes for the same task.

I wish more of these projects would integrate with common, effective, players in specialized areas rather than trying to "be everything to everyone" - a good ERP system these days would really be glue between the powerhouses moreso than replacements.

Alas, this project looks to be struggling - no blog posts since 2011, and minimal activity over 2013 in github.

X49• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say the other software are more capable, but rather more featureful. The problem with OpenBravo and SugarCRM is that it's really really difficult to use. Every procedure depends on another procedure and you need a Book to get going. As a company that is a massive backshot when you have to teach existing employees.

I argue that simplicity in the UI and clear workflows going through the entire application are essential for success, well and marketing. And tree.io had no good marketing, I hope it gets some fresh wind thanks to HN on Github.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

Some ERP projects use single systems, some stitch together "Best of Breed".

There's no consensus about which one is the best form of cash bonfire.

X49• 13 years ago

Tree.io is simple, which allows for customization and specialization. :)

I think you mistake all-in-one with complexity and non-adaptability. Centralization makes software vulnerable, that's right, but not this type of in-house centralization. Correct me if I am wrong.

Even the best and most loosely coupled component-based software has one problem, it needs to be connected (glued if badly written) to other systems to make it useful. What this evolves to is a complex network of interlinked components. Similar to organic systems nature has invented. Ironic, that we humans create similarly working components that we're made out of.

hardwaresofton2• 13 years ago

I can definitely see the value in connecting the systems -- that's without a doubt very important (and a very good reason Microsoft has a corner on the market)

What I was more getting at was that by not focusing on interaction/dealing with centralization or supporting interaction between multiple services, teams usually move faster (less process, if no other gains -- no one has to check your outputs for compatability,etc), and get to do more feature-development.

But then again, as a lazy person who loves open source stuff, any attempt at something so ambitious is awesome I think. I feel like a lemming for saying anything bad about it.

[EDIT] - Taking another look at the tour -- It is pretty amazing. A lot of companies are charging for LESS functionality

treeio8• 13 years ago

For those who doesn't want to have their data in the hands of a third party it makes sense having everything in one system, and because it's open source you can easily extend it if need be.

pbreit• 13 years ago

I'm not sure "ambitious" is even the right word to describe such a project. A demo would be nice. I'm guessing the project has 0 real users (download <> user).

X49• 13 years ago

I measured that +53 Stars have appeared on Github right after posting the link. It received 38 points until now, that means more people have interest in the software than people are upvoing on HN. That's really good to know, I feel sympathy with people who opensource their efforts to help the people of the world. (328 Stars pre HN)

treeio8• 13 years ago

Thanks X4, I put over a year of hard work and a lot of my own money into Tree.io. I'm happy that it's used around the world by companies and universities even though I don't get any money from it.

eranation• 13 years ago

Any idea how they plan to make money? (it's MIT licensed) support? / hosting? or is it not for profit?

siddboots• 13 years ago

I think consulting.

X49• 13 years ago

yes, exactly. Their current business-model is support and consulting afaik.

zdw• 13 years ago

I'm stunned that nobody has made one of these that's CLI based and scriptable...

drmr• 13 years ago

Org mode?

http://orgmode.org/

Killah911• 13 years ago

This is really awesome. The only thing that keeps me from using it right away is that it doesn't seem to have much activity. Anyone have the DL on the creators of the project and if they're maybe monetizing by doing support etc?

Would love to use this, just worried about getting stuck up the creek without a paddle. Many forum questions appear to have been lingering there for months without a response.

JesseObrien• 13 years ago

Can anyone get the install process to actually work? I got to 'python manage.py installdb' and it failed because that command doesn't exist in manage.py. I tried a bunch of the other commands from manage.py help as well and still nothing.

maikhoepfel• 13 years ago

It's a Django project, so the command might be "syncdb" instead. If that doesn't do the trick, they'll have installed a custom management command that doesn't seem to get picked up. Grep the source code for installdb then.

Joeboy• 13 years ago

It sounds as if maybe your pythonpath isn't set up correctly. Try

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/path/to/treeio:/path/to/

(ie add the project path and its parent to PYTHONPATH), then try manage.py installdb again.

NB This is guesswork based on prior django experience, I haven't actually tried installing it.

mjhagen2• 13 years ago

I had to install MySQL-python, but now I'm stuck on a foreign key conflict when importing the initial data.json file.

    IntegrityError: (1452, 'Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails (`treeiodb`.`core_user`, CONSTRAINT `user_id_refs_id_4bf8d20` FOREIGN KEY (`user_id`) REFERENCES `auth_user` (`id`))')

X49• 13 years ago

Please have a look at the issue tracker, there is an easy fix.

Just run: mysql -u username -p -D database < sql/mysql-treeio-current.sql

X49• 13 years ago

https://github.com/treeio/treeio/issues/39

borplk• 13 years ago

Every time I come across these projects I think an easy to use web fronted for Docker would be amazingly useful.

Anyone could install it once and from then you just switch Docker containers in and out to try different projects, etc... and don't have to do the bulk of the server preparation that 99% of people don't know how to do properly or just can't bother with.

It will bring this amazing wealth of self-hosted projects to the every day user.

If it becomes popular projects will start providing Docker containers.

A registry can also be made so that you can search and install them without hassle right from the UI.

Or the command line, "docker-get install tree.io"

Take my idea and run with it! Run!

shykes4• 13 years ago

Docker already includes a registry :)

"docker pull borplk/tres.io"?

You can search at http://index.docker.io

shykes4• 13 years ago

And web UIs for docker:

https://github.com/crosbymichael/dockerui

https://github.com/ehazlett/shipyard

treeio8• 13 years ago

I have created a script to run tree.io in docker with a lightweight (25MB) postgresql instance. Simply install Docker then run this script https://gist.github.com/funkotron/6025664

zimbatm• 13 years ago

I talked to Solomon during DotScale 2013 and submitted that the index could be transformed into an app-store. He didn't seemed opposed to the idea but said they want to focus on making the base stable. Just saying the idea is out there.

Apart from the app-store what's missing is more container metadata with an embedded security model and maybe signed binaries. The server-side also need a UI that is higher-level than the existing Docker UI [1] project. There's also some work missing on state handling.

[1] https://github.com/crosbymichael/dockerui

sciurus2• 13 years ago

What you're proposing are virtual appliances, a virtual machine image "intended to eliminate the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software" (to quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_appliance). It's not uncommon to see commercial software distributed this way, and I've seen some open source projects do it as well. There are multiple existing attempts to build a "registry", such as https://www.vmware.com/latam/appliances/ and http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

shykes4• 13 years ago

The problem with VMs is that they're not a practical vehicle for shipping software, because they're not portable. Developers will always have to deal with multiple incompatible VM formats, in addition to deployment targets which simply don't support VM deployment at all. What's missing is a "common ancestor" to all these different formats, which can be exported to a VM when necessary, but also run natively in places where VMs are not available. That's what docker containers are.

etchalon• 13 years ago

That's a.) incredible that it's open source (thanks!) but b.) truly a terrible UI.

sleepyhead• 13 years ago

Like all open source applications. I use OSS exclusively for development. I think the only OSS GUI app I use is Sequel Pro (which is actually quite good).

clarkm• 13 years ago

Did this used to be called Giteso? Did it just get renamed to Tree.io or it a completely different product?

I'm only asking because the bottom of http://tree.io/en/jobs mentions it. :)

radicalbyte• 13 years ago

http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110228035141/http://tree.io...

© 2011 Giteso Ltd. All rights reserved. Registered in England. Company No. 07416236

treeio8• 13 years ago

Tree.io used to be called Hardtree and our company Giteso, we renamed both to Tree.io

ziggamon• 13 years ago

Name seemed familiar, and in deed their blog has posts from 2011 when they were a SaaS. Anyone know what happened, did it simply fail and they open sourced it or is there something else in play here?

Cool project either way though :)

JohnLBevan• 13 years ago

My guess is enterprises were scared of going the SaaS route; partly as this model is still relatively new, but mainly because companies like to keep their data in house (or at least need the option to easily get hold of a regular backup / with some way to quickly restore it should the vendor go under).

treeio8• 13 years ago

Infrastructure costs. We had too many users on the free tier (5 users for free) and our server costs went through the roof. We didn't know how to find investment and my business partner needed cash so took a contract job.

Bjoern• 13 years ago

This reminds me of TeamBox (version 3 is also opensource).

X49• 13 years ago

Here's a video introducing it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORKhxzwO43k&list=UUBWJQIUhDQz...

Tree.io – Open Source Business Management Software

Related Stories