HopToDesk – Free Remote Desktop Software for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS | Hacker News Reader

HopToDesk – Free Remote Desktop Software for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS

hoptodesk.com

59 pointschuchana34 comments

The idea of a new free cross-platform remote access product sounds great if it can be trusted. That "if" is however a very big if.

The website says HopToDesk is Open Source but there is no link to any repos that I can find on the website. GitLab has a recently opened HopToDesk account with just 5 stars and no obvious traceability on first look from my phone to any real identifiable human contributors.

HopToDesk says it's an American company based in the US but LinkedIn is not showing me any evidence of the company existing and no employees associated with it. Neither does the preliminary googling I've done. My searches are far from exhaustive and certainly not authoritative but normally when someone builds a company that solves an important problem the people involved are proud of having done so and are easily findable. The first 5 other remote access software companies I looked up on LinkedIn all had obvious search results with easily discoverable employees, founders, and etc.

The License file in the GitLab repo is a generic AGPL file with no mention of any corporate entity or individual holding any copyrights. Again, this is a quick look from my phone so not authoritative, but again it's not at all confidence inspiring.

Commercial remote access products are quite expensive to subscribe to and typically have real costs to operate in the form of connectivity charges. If customers are not paying for the service, are the customers (and their machines) the real product being sold here?

I'm not finding anything in a quick search that gives me any confidence I should trust this app, and I'm seeing lots of things that are not confidence inspiring.

Just fyi, the "Source"[0] link is at the bottom of the page

[0] https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk

Thanks - it's also become apparent the repo is a fork of RustDesk, which isn't immediately obvious from either the site contents or the repo history.

So what happens in cases like these?

Looks like RustDesk doesn't have a Copyright notice or copyright info in the license or source code. This codebase comes along and has no attribution information to make it obvious that it is indeed a fork of RustDesk.

Is the copyright implicit, and is HopToDesk in legal violation for not making it apparent?

RustDesk looks to just have a generic AGPL license with no additional copyright listed beyond the Free Software Foundation copyright statement. IANAL but my read is that means RustDesk releases its code under a license that allows this type of activity.

The FSF is the strongest champion of free as in libre licenses. Free as in libre is intentionally far more permissive than free as in beer. There are times when free as in libre is desired for all kinds of good use cases, but that unfortunately also means the projects are also free as in libre for all kinds of bad use cases. That's the fundamental challenge everyone who works in open source software has to deal with. Free as in libre and free as in beer are different things, and as soon as you start putting restrictions on use cases you shift from free as in libre to free as in beer (or not even free as in beer).

Maybe someday we'll have licenses that neatly resolve this problem, but we don't yet and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. RustDesk likely chose the AGPL in part because in many people's minds AGPL offers an appealing intersection of free as in libre with requirements that many view as in conflict with running the software as a business. HopToDesk would be an existence proof that AGPL is not the barrier to commercial operations that some people advocate it is, leaving the world in a state where licensing open source code for "good" uses only (as in you can't take my open source code and make a competing business with it) is a hard unsolved problem. As another commenter here mentioned, Blender has had a lot of challenges with this sort of thing, as have a range of open source projects that hope to make money off hosting of their projects and consequently don't want AWS offering branded hosting of their projects.

Judging by the trustpilot review solicitation, the business model could be "start free, amass trustpilot reviews and backlinks for SEO purposes, rank near the top of google searches, start charging for the service".

I remember hearing about Blender having a problem with people downloading the source, rebranding it, and selling access to their "new" program without mention of the full featured free software. This "fork" of RustDesk currently seems insufficiently different in terms of business model made even more sinister since instead of charging directly it insists on making you route desktop control through their servers.

That's precisely what it is.

Quite grim really, shameful conduct to not only do that but come here and try to display the carcass with ...pride?

There's rustdesk for those looking for an opensource alternative

https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk

The source code for this fork seems to be available: https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk

Going by the interactions listed in that issue, I'm not so sure how reliable this fork is, though.

I tried running that in docker earlier today, but didn't read through the documentation and thus didn't figure out how to get to a web UI for it. Had a brief look around and saw that it doesn't work with Wayland, so will try something else first. I'd like something similar to Guacamole (which seems to have disconnection issues with windows RDP connections) and will have a look at HopToDesk along with https://oss.rport.io/ and https://meshcentral.com/info/

Thanks! I thought HopToDesk might be worth a look as an alternative to TeamViewer, but RustDesk seems more interesting.

It probably doesn't have to, but I'd expect a fork to mention its origin and explain at least the advantages it's supposed to have.

So wants the purpose of a holding company floating a fork of rustdesk that is supposed to be free for commercial and home use? What's the money angle Here?

I am an ardent supporter of rustdesk because it allignes with my belief system and the development is rocket fast.

You submit a bug request and it will be fixed very quickly.

They have a self hosting server so its not like there are problems with "trusting" the server. You can roll your own. Compared to anydesk/team viewer/no machine/zoho assist whatever, this is the only open source software that actually competes with proprietary software and is feature complete to a good bit.

Again, as a fork of rustdesk, what exactly are they bringing on the table?

> Do I need to configure my router or firewall to use HopToDesk?

> HopToDesk should simply work and be able to connect to any peer without needing to change any router or firewall settings. Other remote desktop tools such as Windows Remote Desktop and VNC do require setting up port forwarding or opening ports on the router or firewall to allow remote connections to be made, however this is not the case with HopToDesk

Does that means that all traffic is routed through some of their servers?

Edit: they say it's open source so I went to https://github.com/hoptodesk to look at the code and surprisingly there are only a couple of exe and an AGPL.

Edit2: the code is at https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk

Edit3 and Answer: they do have a server, search for rendezvous in the source code. Self hosting is in the roadmap, see https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk/-/issues/5

STUN/TURN could be at play. The latter will use the relay to move data between participants.

This project is a fork of RustDesk so if you're looking for something with selfhosting support, you can try that. RustDesk is also clearer on the way the network works in terms of STUN/TURN.

The free Chrome Remote Desktop has been a lifesaver for me dozens of times.

My company's LogMeIn subscription just recently got cancelled and we will not be resubscribing due to continual billing run-arounds with them.

I found DWService as an alternative (https://www.dwservice.net/en/home.html) and have given it a brief try but was surprised not to find any mentions of it on HN. It seems to have an open source client, but the back end is not open source. Does anyone know this service and have any thoughts about it?

I'm giving RustDesk a try now instead of this based on people's comments here.

I've been using splashtop and jumpdesk

Splashtop here too. I’ve been using it for ~7 years and have no complaints. It does everything I need at a fair price. I’ve used it on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu.

Ultimately I just gave up on trying these out since they always end up adding conditions that make them impossible to use for free (looking at you especially TeamView). That said, I'm still relying on a a free product from a commercial company, but not a remote desktop one. In the end I have set up a ZeroTier VLAN that I have all my machines on so I can just use built in remote desktop services and SSH.

Could not find the info on the website. Here is the git link https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk Please correct if wrong

I was trying to find this thread again, https://jumpshare.com/

The logos look really similar....

Is there anything interesting about this compared to NoMachine, which was recommended by HN'ers in another recent thread that discussed remote access solutions?

Could you tell me what other thread that is? I did a search and didn't come up with anything except very old threads, and recent posts with no comments.

Sure…

6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856620

16 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33730299

22 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33656637

Wow nomachine x... I haven't used that in almost 20years... It was good back then when you needed to compress your screen through a 128kbps uplink....

Anyone tried this? How does it compare to RustDesk?

This issue suggests HopToDesk is a fork of RustDesk https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk/-/issues/5

How does this compare to X2Go?

Free today, pay tomorrow

Another TeamView, LogMeIn former user eh? :)

I’ve been burned by every free remote access software ever released lol

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