Hacker News Reader

Comment by deforciant | Hacker News Reader

the problem with cal.com "open source" self-hosting is that they have made it quite difficult to run yourself. For example this https://developer.cal.com/self-hosting/docker actually doesn't provide docker images but you need to build it yourself because for some reason frontend needs hardcoded hostname. In no other app I have seen such limitations :) Also, an older version from a year ago just stopped working, couldn't fix it, couldn't update it either :D

It would be good if someone made a fork with fixed setup and docker images for self-hosting :)

View on HN

Why does it need to be a fork and not contribution to this repo?

There is no end of feature requests, but polite way is to appreciate what is already done by original authors and fill your requests as GitHub issue.

Disclaimer: not affiliated to them, just find your comment disrespectful.

One reason would be a CLA. Presumably to contribute to their main repo, you need to sign a CLA to ensure they can relicense this thing as needed. A separate fork wouldn't have that requirement, or shouldn't if it's in good faith.

Why would you not want such an agreement? It means the main maintainer(s) have standing if there is a license dispute.

IANAL. As a contributor? It means the company can relicense my contributions into a license that is wildly different from their current one (including no license/copyright). It affords me no benefit.

There are CLA alternatives like the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) that ensure the company has the "legal standing" to accept a contribution without infringing on copyright, but it doesn't give them the ability to relicense.

> It affords me no benefit.

Sure they could relicense it to something wildly different, but they can't retroactively take back old versions of it, so you can still run it as it was when you made the contributions.

I wish nobody required CLAs, but I'm glad that there are products like Cal that would (assumedly) be closed contribution otherwise due to (real or perceived) legal risk.

> It affords me no benefit.

It means they can sue for open source license violations on your behalf, something that's a bit harder if they don't actually wholly own the copyright.

That could be a reason, but I don't see a CLA in their contributing guide[1].

[1] https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

IANAL, but that could have some interesting implications for their enterprise licensing/builds I believe. They can't relicense the code for their enterprise builds, so it stays AGPL due to linking/AGPL infection. Would be an interesting court case.

I've contributed to this repo (and I also self host Calendly) and didn't have to sign anything.

It _is_ a pain to self-host, but unlike claims elsewhere in this thread I do also self-host the API and database.

> and I also self host Calendly)

Is the core of Calendly open-source?

I skimmed their repos but it looks like they don't include the "secret sauce" to self-hosting your own event+booking platform: https://github.com/orgs/calendly/repositories

Judging by their English they’re almost certainly from the Baltic so I don’t think his tone was intended as disrespectful

Didn't want to sound disrespectful, I did like the UI and liked the idea of self-hosting. Regarding fork vs pr - just putting myself into their shoes I understand why there's probably no will to make the self-hosting easy and potentially make it a bit harder than it should be :)

what's wrong with this image? https://hub.docker.com/r/calcom/cal.com

let me update the docs

Instructions aren't for the docker image, they are for the standard js installation.

This puzzles me, there are often cases where hostnames are baked into frontends. Also, not everyone wants to use docker, so it's not exactly mandatory to have docker images. Dockerizing most things is rather simple, anyway.

I prefer to simply install rather than use docker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com