Hey, community :)
I run a website that showcases the best open-source companies. Recently, I’ve added a new feature that filters self-hosted tools and presents them in a searchable format. Although there are other options available, like Awesome-Selfhosted, I found it difficult to find what I needed there, so I decided to display the information in a more digestible format.
You can check out the list here: https://openalternative.co/self-hosted
Let me know if there’s anything else I should add to the list.
Thanks!
Love the list, but scrolling through, the one liners don’t mean much for a lot of these.
The descriptions are just too short and vague to even understand what a lot of them actually do.
Noted! I have longer descriptions in the db, but didn’t want to bloat the listings. Will try with a longer description soon.
It’s a tough balance, you don’t want a whole page for each one. Maybe if there was a clear list of tags so it’s easier to understand even what category they’re talking about?
For example:
Penpot
Design freedom meets open-source collaboration
I really don’t know what this product category even is. Is it for web layout? Is it a drawing program? Is it for CAD?
Added longer description and major alternative when you hover over the cards. Hope that’ll make it easier to browse.
Yeah, that looks amazing, and it’s really quick. That’s a huge improvement!
I’m tired of Cloudflare … 😔
Yeah I havent been able to load the cf verification on my android for like over a week now lol
There are awesome self-hosted, awesome non-free self-hosted and awesome sysadmin too
Appreciate the effort, but without categories it’s not going to sail too far.
Right now it’s just a long list of everything that it’s out there, awesome-selfhosted is much more usable for looking up what you need.
Also, did you join any kind of affiliate programs/partnerships for these “10% off” green boxes? If so, would be great to disclose it. Nothing bad with getting some cash, but community will just appreciate the honesty.
They do have categories, via the menu at the top:
There are some affiliate links on the website, but the discounted products are not affiliated. I just reached out to the owners asking for an exclusive discount for paid plans.
There are categories on the website, but not directly on the list. But here is “full-text” search, so you could technically search by category or an alternative. Try “analytics” or “google analytics” for example.
One thing I would like to see is a way to distinguish which apps do Real™ Open Source vs fakie open source. For example, I see Joplin on there saying “Your secure, open-source note-taking companion”. I guess that’s technically true at this point in time, but they also force contributors to sign a CLA so they have the option to pull the rug later on. (Something which does happen.)
They even say so explicitly:
This is necessary so that if we ever want to change the license again we are able to do so
— https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
And fine, if they want to do that it’s up to them. I’d just like a quick way to tell the difference between open source 😒 and Open Source 😄.
The Free Software Foundation requires “CLAs” as well. I have no fear that they’re going to rug-pull. I don’t think we can use that as the indicator. IMO, it’s even a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.
The warning for me is if the project is run by a company, especially a VC-backed company. Joplin isn’t, so I would be comfortable using it (although I don’t).
Interesting! I didn’t realize this! https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
So it seems like the FSF does this in order to be able to enforce GPL. Buuut, these guys really gotta be the exception. I feel like the probability of the FSF selling out and going full corporate evil is pretty low…
a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.
That’s exactly the problem though. The project owning the code, instead of the contributors owning the code.
How would you determine if a thing is true open source, or capitalism masquerading as open source like you’ve described, if you were to just stumble onto a software randomly and wanted to check?
For the specific case I’m talking about (CLAs), I check if the project (on GitHub or wherever) requires signing a CLA to contribute. In Joplin’s case, they do:
- https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
- https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/index.md#signing-the-individual-contributor-license-agreement
Basically, with a CLA they can change the license at any time to whatever they want. If they want to go closed source tomorrow they can with zero trouble. Without a CLA, they would need approval from everyone who has contributed to the project to do a license change, giving the project proper open source protections.
