Twake – open-source Google Workspace alternative | Hacker News Reader

Twake – open-source Google Workspace alternative

twake.app

27 pointsFaelian219 comments

This tool is made by the french OSS company Linagora, active in that space for more than 20 years.

They mostly likely have thousands of users running on corporate or state platforms so it's not a "one off project" supported by a couple individuals, it's an actual stack with probably a large dev team.

However, Linagora has been entangled in a legal battle for 10 years with former employees that founded BlueMind[0], a competing offer. Latest episode in the saga appears to be "back to square one" with the legal case coming back to a fresh start based on complex legal issues [1]

[0]https://www.bluemind.net/

[1]https://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/l-esprit-libre/blue-mind-linagora...

It looks like most of their products are just re-badges of existing open source products, including, for some reason, a java-based email server.

Twake Chat is a Matrix client, seems to be a fork of https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat

Twake Mail backend is a fork of https://github.com/apache/james-project but it seems their app can work with any JMAP server.

Twake Drive (web app) and Twake Mail (mobile) seem original.

Absolutely hilarious that they advertise themselves as "privacy first", while demanding a phone number (with no alternative) to even create an account.

Notes:

* For something pitching itself as open source, the source is hard to find. And I couldn't find any source for the server components, though I admint the site is obtuse enough that I may have simply given up looking.

* I don't see any documentation on self-hosting so far.

* I don't see any documentation of their pricing for their hosted service.

This all combines to make it nigh-impossible to evaluate. I hope it turns into what the headline says it is, but I don't see a way to assess that just yet.

The link submitted has "Get On Github" right up front.

The github link has the third line in the readme say "run in docker".

It appears to be a suite and the github link only takes you to their drive alternative, so you have to go up a level to see the other projects. It could be better, but it wasn't completely terrible.

I found the drive one from that link, and I found the email one from going up a level. I couldn't find the rest. And the drive and email ones just looked like client components, but maybe I missed something.

Yes, organisation of links could be better.

https://github.com/linagora/twake-workplace

The email client readme has a link to the email backend repo. Idk i certainly didn't get the impression they were trying to hide the code.

Every one of their product's page, plus the frontpage, has a direct link labeled "get on GitHub". I don't know how it could be easier to find.

The deployment documentation seem appropriate for Docker-based services: https://github.com/linagora/ToM-server/blob/master/docker.md https://github.com/linagora/tmail-backend/blob/master/tmail-... (although Twake Drive's docs seem under construction)

I'm glad that people are working on this, but not sure I get why this needs to be one unified suite of software. IMO, it would be more productive to focus on a single one of the apps and make that good before doing them all at once.

Because managers like to hear things like "suite" and "turnkey solution". Normal people don't want to assemble their own solution from disparate parts.

Have you been to a clothes store?

People happily mix and match parts when they feel that they understand the subject area. I bet the IT team (even just the CTO) in a company that considers to use OSS instead of the typical O365 or G.Suite has plenty of opinion, and likely expertise, to consider at least various integrations, and possibly introducing other components. A suite still has a lot of appeal.

These are actually separate apps, possibly they can work standalone.

But the idea is to offer a suite, much like Google's, with all familiar tools present and integrated by the common auth / account system. I bet this is geared towards selling the services to governmental bodies and some privacy-conscious businesses, RedHat-style. To do that successfully, you have to check certain boxes.

The breadth is quite impressive, honestly.

not having investigated this tool, I'll say that the key thing for 'open alternatives' is simplicity of hosting, + many tools have failed me in the past

thinking specifically of immich + simplenotes, which have complex docker compose stacks, and at least immich requires a lot of TLC to keep the backend in sync with the frontend. fail at this and your images will not sync.

(and I am not knocking it, I use it + love it)

these apps are in a sense featureful, with ML indexing and other search features, but in a sense just auth wrappers on file storage; hosting them they should, somehow, be simpler than it is

I tried to sign-up... the SMS code never arrived.

I was told I requested the sign-up code too fast. IMHO they’re receiving too many signups at once and they’re being rate-limited by their SMS provider…

Only the source for the Drive component seems to be available...

They do appear to link to the wrong project.

https://github.com/linagora/twake-workplace

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