
Hackpad goes open source - theyeti
https://twitter.com/bryanlanders/status/586235797571002368/photo/1
======
dgellow
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"

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

~~~
woodrow
Etherpad.

------
tln
The same team @ Dropbox is developing the conceptual successor,
[https://composer.dropbox.com](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.

------
mintplant
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.)

~~~
Sir_Substance
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.

~~~
mintplant
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.

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

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

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

------
icco
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...](https://hackpad.com/Hackpad-is-teaming-up-with-
Dropbox-m1Fne5A6Lzn)

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

~~~
krisdol
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.

------
anurags
Guess the code will live here:
[https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad](https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad)

------
numberwhun
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.

~~~
ytjohn
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.

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

They are not the same.

Seems [http://libreboard.com/](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)

~~~
geoelectric
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701)

------
tomglindmeier
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?

------
w4rh4wk5
"Hackpad has been acquired by Dropbox."

 _closes tab_

~~~
clapsclaps
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.

~~~
baldfat
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.

~~~
clapsclaps
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.

~~~
baldfat
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
...

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

[https://incubator.apache.org/wave/](https://incubator.apache.org/wave/)

------
mariusz79
Oh, ok, so Hackpad which is a fork of an open source software is now open
source (again)? Wanna cookie for this?

