Hackpad goes open source | Hacker News Reader

Hackpad goes open source

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85 pointstheyeti31 comments

Transcription:

"Hi Hackpad admin!

We have some exciting news — Hackpad will be released as open source software in the next few weeks!

As you may know, Hackpad started as a fork of an existing open source project. We’re incredibly proud to give back to this community and excited to make the Hackpad codebase available to anyone, especially our customers.

As the open source release approaches, we’ll send you instructions on how to download your Hackpads in case you want to move your data somewhere else. (Don’t worry; you’ll still be able to keep your data on hackpad.com.)

If you have questions or just want to chat, drop us a line at hackpad-oss@dropbox.com.

-Alex, Igor, Mime, Julia and the Hackpad Team"

never heard of it before, which project was it a fork of?

Etherpad.

The same team @ Dropbox is developing the conceptual successor, https://composer.dropbox.com

As a (paid) Hackpad user, I was offered the chance to migrate to Composer and try it out. It was clear that Hackpad.com is not getting sunsetted too quickly.

Now that there'll be an open source option, we'll also have the ability to just migrate to that. This is very considerate of users IMO.

I remember trying Hackpad when it first popped up here on HN. I signed in with my Google account and was surprised to find that it had pulled a photo of me to use as my avatar—a photo that I had never knowingly put online. Nothing bad, just a Christmas photo, but it was personal and not meant to be plastered on the web. Being privacy-conscious, I had always tried to keep photos of me off of the internet.

At this time there wasn't any way to change your profile picture through the web interface. I tried to get in touch but never received any replies. My face was stuck there on my profile, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Just checked and the picture was still there. There's a "Change profile picture" link now, but it seems to be broken: uploading a new picture does nothing. At least you can delete your account now, which I've done.

Hackpad is a great tool, and I wish them the best with the open source release, but this is the experience that has stuck in my mind. Don't pull photos from people's accounts without asking for permission, especially not for public display.

(I'm still not sure where the photo came from, as I could never find it on my Google account. I suspect some misconfigured Windows Phone privacy / contact syncing setting was the culprit.)

Not to be a cracked record, or anything, but this is why I don't use cloud services.

What else is hanging around on profiles you don't know about and didn't ask for? You don't know! It's all hidden in ~the cloud~ where you can't see it or do anything about it.

The answer is not to have a go at the hackpad guys, it's to not centralise everything on google.

Well, yeah, I never even asked (intentionally) for this photo to be sent to Google in the first place. Like you say, I don't store this stuff on "the cloud". So Windows Phone holds the blame for that.

gravatar?

No, not Gravatar. I had a different, non-photo avatar set up for my email address.

For myself and my peers it was our gravatar.

Don't visit hackpad.com it has a backdoor php/rst.ac

MSE notified me that it had quarantined a threat. I didn't realize it was this website -_-

Same here. But I deleted the quarantined file and reloaded the site to verify. MSE notified me again. 0_0

Why is this a link to a tweet?

I don't see any mention of this on their site, so that's probably why... Looks they did get acquired by dropbox: https://hackpad.com/Hackpad-is-teaming-up-with-Dropbox-m1Fne...

So yay! More open source code, but it will probably be unmaintained.

They got acquired a long time ago. This was announced in an email to current members, with more information coming soon regarding the specifics. The email was posted on hn yesterday, but it didn't get as much attention as the tweet.

Guess the code will live here: https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad

So what separates this from Trello (which is an amazing (and also free) project? I don't really see anything that sets it apart, right off.

I haven't tried hackpad, but if hackpad can (now) be described as an open-source Trello, that would be great. That opens up the option for self hosting, even if it's on a VM like a Digital Ocean droplet.

I have tried both (kind of, only etherpad not hackpad).

They are not the same.

Seems http://libreboard.com/ is trying to be an open source alternative to Trello. (Found it as one of the first apps available on sandstorm.io)

Did libreboard ever quit ganking Trello's graphical assets? That was a real issue when I first saw it announced a couple of months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701

More document oriented. And soon going to be open-source.

Trello is not a collaborative document editor

I generally think open sourcing software is a good thing. But what does it me to the project in this case? Is Hackpad droped by Dropbox?

"Hackpad has been acquired by Dropbox."

closes tab

well, the news is they are going open source. Does it matter they were acquired by Dropbox one year ago? Maybe that's exactly why now they are going open source.

Well the issue that is unsaid right now is this: "We are shutting down development and are dumping this onto Github if anyone wants to use the code or the community needs to maintain it."

This could just mean it's a dead project.

and that there are a great opportunity for open source community to make it better. It's a great piece of software in terms of usability.

Without a active maintainer unfortunately it is just dead bits. I haven't officially heard anything that this is the case but "usually" these kind of announcements mean that development has stopped.

It is still better to do this than just close the door and hide the code, but ...

See: Google Wave. It's still in the Apache Incubator and doesn't look much different.

https://incubator.apache.org/wave/

IIRC hackpad was originally a form of etherpad.

It's gone full circle.

Oh, ok, so Hackpad which is a fork of an open source software is now open source (again)? Wanna cookie for this?

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