Dobase – Your workspace, your server
76 points
3 days ago
| 8 comments
| dobase.co
| HN
yellowapple
3 hours ago
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> No licensee or downstream recipient may use the Software (including any modified or derivative versions) to directly compete with the original Licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted, managed, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product or cloud service where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself.

No thanks. These “almost-but-not-quite-FOSS” licenses are a blight.

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nick-sta
2 hours ago
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I don't see the issue - the creator is reserving the right to create their own paid hosted version?
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EvanAnderson
1 hour ago
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That's absolutely fine for them, but they shouldn't call it "Open-source" and "Fully open source" (like they do on the linked page).

This software is source-available. Open Source licenses don't discriminate on the basis use of the software.

Using the term Open Source for license like this is dishonest. It seeks to profit from the goodwill from actual Open Source software.

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gardnr
1 hour ago
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I appreciate your view but consensus reality does not agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
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EvanAnderson
1 hour ago
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I can link to community-edited articles, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Definition

We make the consensus reality. I'm part of the faction that wants this particular reality, so I advocate for it.

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eudoxus
1 hour ago
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OSD !== Open Source. All OSD is Open Source, not all Open Source is OSD. You are free to disagree, but the OSI has chosen (more accurately forced to choose) very explicitly to only define and trademark OSD. There's really not much more to the conversation then that.
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ptman
1 hour ago
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Some will argue that it is Open Source. But Open Source came from commercial interests against Free Software.

It's clearly not free software, since the user freedom is restricted.

It's not libre, since that also refers to freedoms.

It's not really Open Source.

Source-Available has been used to describe this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

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rock_artist
1 hour ago
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The confusing thing for me related to that was Try Free which leads me to look for pricing. But with only Try free I get suspicious of even private or small team.

If it’s free for use. Try is a confusing term.

Off topic, I’d really wish any service or product with tiers would have pricing in a discoverable way.

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esquire_900
20 minutes ago
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This seems exactly not what you want. If fully invested in this, you never have the freedom to switch tools, ie go to a different team chat solution. The benefits of having these apps in one UI / ecosystem are relatively small: files - teamchat makes sense, but todo-email, kanban-recpies doesn't add any value.

Like samdixon mentions with ClickUp, the downside is quite large UX wise: you'd be constantly switching context witin dobase. Having 10 pinned tabs for all your tools is very convenient, checking a todo while working on an email in dobase feels messy.

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samdixon
6 hours ago
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Clickup is kinda like this (trash software btw) where it combines all these things. Its super cumbersome to deal with all of them in the same UI. For example, you will be chatting with someone, need to look at ticket, you have to completely leave the context of the chat to find the ticket. Yeah you can have multiple tabs, but still cumbersome. Would rather have a chat app for chat, documentation in documentation... so on.
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szszrk
1 minute ago
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That's exactly how I feel Teams want's me to use it. It's just... dumb, all those "apps" that are integrated, but in reality it's just another super heavy website that you can't easily jump into/out of.
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ramon156
44 minutes ago
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Has anyons (except 37sign) used Basecamp in a small/medium/large corp? I'm really curious how well it works
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argee
6 hours ago
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Could you elaborate on what makes Clickup "trash software", is it something specific to Clickup or your opinion around this entire "class" of all-in-one workspace?
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samdixon
6 hours ago
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Here are a few things off the top:

- horrible optimization

    - video calls will easily bloat 1-3gb of ram
- buggy, things that should work sometimes don't

    - e.g. sometimes you click to write... you get a spinner, wait 10 seconds
- poor ux. I have been using it for 4+ years at work, still have trouble finding things

- yeah, all things in one interface

These are opinions. People can have different. To me, its just a slow and difficult to navigate mess that doesn't know what it wants to be.

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esafak
6 hours ago
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It does know: it wants to be everything -- they remind you in every ad!
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BoorishBears
2 hours ago
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ClickUp is known to be extremely slow and buggy, in a way that technical people can infer is a reflection of their mission to literally do everything an organization needs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/clickup/comments/1s0tkz8/disappoint...

https://www.reddit.com/r/clickup/comments/1rxbtla/im_so_tire...

Who ever built a piece of quality software by setting out to build multiple otherwise unrelated pieces of software with extremely tight coupling to satisfy enterprise bargain hunting?

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anilgulecha
5 hours ago
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IMO we need more sovereign systems like this (this is too simple IMO). Other sovereign systems are complex to deploy. if good FOSS commodity options come up, then we can expect a hosting/deployment infra and companies to setup and offer it for non self-hosters as well - ala WordPress.
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Jnr
1 hour ago
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Except this is not FOSS. If it was open source, they would have chosen at least AGPL.

And also I don't think their architecture is any good for such a product.

For me personally, it would be sufficient to avoid it based on the license alone. But altogether it just looks very unappealing.

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kkfx
45 minutes ago
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Since we have a single mind, we need "everything apps", this one shows various issues but the idea of an everything app is damm good.
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chopete3
2 hours ago
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What is stopping one to have a chrome or other browser window with pinned links to Email, Calendar, Drive and other web links?

Why build a full app?. They could released a Chrome extension to let users configure their links for each of those apps. Wasted effort.

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whilenot-dev
1 hour ago
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> They could released a Chrome extension to let users configure their links for each of those apps. Wasted effort.

This app isn't just some link aggregator or an admin dashboard, though. It's workplace software that hosts all your data, self-hosted on your system of choice if you wish. I'm neither a user of nor am I affiliated with this project, but it seems like there's the aspiration to provide a unified client interface for every app, and it looks like you could BYOC as well (for CalDAV and Email).

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hperrin
6 hours ago
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The commit log is filled with AI generated commits. I wouldn’t trust that on my server.
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argee
6 hours ago
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I want to know why this [0] needed to be co-authored by Claude. Especially because it seems like the kind of change you'd explicitly want to make without Claude's "help" (presuming that's how that got in there).

[0] https://github.com/smgdkngt/dobase/commit/597684fc67b67f5a2a...

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superice
3 hours ago
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Asking Claude to commit and push triggers the Co-Authored-By thing typically, even if the change was made by hand. It could entirely be possible the author just asked it to generate a commit message for this change (although the style doesn't strike me as very Claude like).
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spartanatreyu
5 hours ago
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Blocking AI users on github is such a quick way to avoid most slop and get advanced notice when an existing project has started going into tech/cognitive debt.

You'll get a warning banner for those repos if you go to these users and block them:

- github.com/claude

- github.com/cursoragent

- github.com/gemini-code-assist

---

Example of the warning banner and more discussion here: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116115453811522063

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yodon
7 hours ago
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Can I drag an email directly onto a Kanban or a Todo list, and prioritize it like a task, and then click on the card or task to go directly to the mail message, in the context of its thread?
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warkdarrior
5 hours ago
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I wanted to try a demo, but they require you to sign up for an account and configure it with email access, etc. Too painful for a demo.
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achille
3 hours ago
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i registered for their demo and it seems to be unable to do any of the advertised features. nearly everything crashes; feels like a ux wireframe not yet wired it
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