Forking them Hackpads!

[dokterbob]

Hackpad is now forked as Whackpad!

https://github.com/whackpad/hackpad

History

Hackpad is unmaintained

As it seems from #51, Hackpad is been unmaintained since Dropbox launched Pages. Despite being grateful that they're still hosting the service and were so kind to Open Source it, having production-grade projects use products that are unmaintained is a bad idea.

Creating a community fork

This is why I'd like to suggest the creation of a fork, under a different name and community-maintained GH organisation, so we can maintain Hackpad without relying on Dropbox.

Like many of you, I still feel Hackpad is a great product which fills an important niche in the Open Source ecosystem. Basically, if you've ever had to use Etherpad-lite (from which Hackpad is a fork) you'll notice the significant UI improvements in Hackpad.

But comes the question: would some of you be interested in working, with me, on this?

Despite being an experienced Open Source web developer, my knowledge about the Hackpad/Etherpad codebase is limited and my personal availability is limited to discussing issues, reviewing contributions and release engineering.

Joining the effort

Would you be interested in joining? If so, what time, expertise and responsibilities could you contribute?

Also, feel free to retweet https://twitter.com/mathijsfietst/status/811171523872641024 for endorsement.

Points of action

In order to provide a useable fork of Hackpad, it seems sensible that the following actions should be taken:

• Find collaborators
• Find maintainers (2 or 3 people)
• Consensus on a name
• Start a GH orga, add maintainers
• Fork hackpad with new name
• Communication infrastructure (i.e. IRC/Gitter/Slack)
• Rename Hackpad in repository
• Getting Hackpad to run (again) in Docker
• MIgrate existing issues
• Create a public web page
• Provide hosted version of fork
• Implement data import/export to/from Hackpad
• Merge selective patches from existing forks (notably spikeekips/hackpad, kudelabs/collabpad, janprill/hackpad
• Merge selective upstream patches from ether/etherpad-lite
• Ask Dropbox for a redirect to the new fork

Name suggestions

Some ideas for names could be:

• NuPad
• OpenPad: +1
• FreePad
• whackpad
• HackPad (IFF Dropbox is willing to release the trademark and domain name it's still an excellent name!)

References, mentions

• Maintainers of existing forks: @spikeekips @kudelabs @janprill
• Contributors: @igorkofman @kjc-stripe @clizzin @Monoban @trustrachel @dandv @TakeshiTseng @mvillis
• Relevant issues Is Hackpad unmaintained? #51, Trying to reach Hackpad team #61, Let's update Hackpad! #62

[ToniIltanen]

I'm willing to participate, if we can gather up a community for this!

[jaakkokorhonen]

Yes, I'm in too. +1 for OpenPad. And if someone's interested in

• voting functionality, that would be cool.

[dokterbob]

Thanks for the feedback so far!

@jaakkokorhonen What do you mean with voting functionality? Like polls? Or for collaboration in the development team (in which case I recommend Loomio.

[jaakkokorhonen]

@dokterbob not Loomio. Something more agile, like a "+1", "reaction" or "thumbs up" for prioritizing proposals or proposed tasks.

[ToniIltanen]

• Passport.js based auth strategies, similar to HackMD's implementation of it (easy to add a new auth strategy, or use multiple auth protocols in paraller)

[dokterbob]

I think just maintaining the project should be a primary focus and adding new features should come secondary. I would like to propose to keep this discussion to how, whether and who would maintain a community fork, rather than discussing the roadmap and features (but feel free to create seperate issues for those!).

[jaakkokorhonen]

Sure let's start with Jetty and Solr issues, and whatever bugs there might be. At least with API:s and auth there was some issues that would need to be solved to implement data import/export.

And sure, when we have a fork there should be a separate discussion about whatever additional features people might come up with. We might even expect them to start turning up once the master is maintained once again.

[jaakkokorhonen]

@dokterbob While implementing data import/export to/from Hackpad, where would you prefer to write them, to git?

[dokterbob]

@jaakkokorhonen Some kind of JSON download of the user data seems the right way here. First implement import/export in the fork and then write imort from Hackpad.

[leanderme]

As already mentioned in #62 one of the top priorities should be updating Solr and Jetty. Solr is now a standalone service and should be deintegrated from Hackpads core.

I've already started updating Jetty but the time I can invest is limited. I'm happy to share all insights gained in the architecture of hackpad. I suggest to create a jetty9 branch to begin with.

[dokterbob]

+1 for whackpad

[dokterbob]

Ok, so not much response so far. I'd like to take some action anyways. ;)

Unless I get a response by, let's say, tomorrow, I'll create a GH organization for 'whackpad' and will fork hackpad into it. I'll invite @leandermelms, @jaakkokorhonen and @ToniIltanen as maintainers. I will make sure to create an issue here to redirect potential contributors, as Dropbox seems to have completely taken their hands off this project.

I might or might not:

• Do a search & replace in the hackpad source with whackpad.
• Try and get the site running
• Reserve an appropriate domain name
• Copy issues to the new repository

If you have some remarks or comments relating to the above, let me know.

[ToniIltanen]

@dokterbob Sounds good!

[erwblo]

@dokterbob With Stek.io we would like to play a part in the future of Hackpad because we love the tool and it doesn't deserve to die! So let's see how we can work together! One thing about the name: I think it would be a shame to not use the original Hackpad name and don't see a reason not to do it. Hackpad is open source so the idea is to start using it. And with the name, i assume. Grts

[dokterbob]

Great! I was hoping for a little more feedback. Haven’t had time to create the actual org and GH organization, but feel free to move ahead on that - if you feel you have consensus on the name. With regards to the name, however, there are licensing issues. Specifically, the Apache license does not allow the use of trademarks, such as Hackpad is. Moreover, it seems wise to use a name for which the domain name is available. Hence, I am still waiting/hoping for Dropbox to explicitly allow us the use of the name and/or domain. As they have not succeeded in doing so over the last weeks, I am afraid this was too much to hope for… So, if Hackpad is legally unavailable, would you be ok with going for whackpad?

[pors]

@dokterbob I am not aware there is a trademark for the name hackpad, see http://www.wipo.int/branddb/en/. Also, it seems dropbox is not really interested in this project anymore.

I propose to fork the project to this organization I created https://github.com/hackpad and all who are interested in contributing can be added to it.

Is there a better way to talk to you than in this issue? :) Maybe we can set up a slack or irc channel?

[dokterbob]

@pors I am pretty sure Hackpad would be legally considered a trademark by Dropbox, even though they didn't register it. This means legal issues might force us to change the project's name at a later stage. It also means that Dropbox's hackpad.com will be running an older, inferior, version of a project with the same name - which is out of our control. Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trademark

Looking at the history of several other FOSS projects that forked from their trademarked counterparts, you'll see that name changing towards a 'community owned' name is a common pattern. I'm talking LibreOffice, Chromium, MariaDB to name a few.

Good idea about communication. I've just created #hackpad on FreeNode (IRC) and #hackpad:chat.weho.st (recommend the latter, check out https://riot.im/). Hope to meet you all there.

[dokterbob]

The fork has been made, recreated all migration-specific points as issues there. Let's continue our work and discussion there!

https://github.com/whackpad/whackpad