Open alternative

This page lists alternatives to proprietary software which we sometimes use in the Growstuff project, and/or tips for finding open options.

What's wrong with the non-open options
This is an incomplete list based on issues that specifically affect us.


 * Proprietary software or services may lock up your data so it can't be extracted or used elsewhere, thus locking you into the service.
 * Proprietary services may close down or change their service at any time, leaving you in the lurch.
 * Proprietary software is more likely to include spyware, malware, or other nasties.
 * Some services may reject/refuse service to certain people or classes of people.

Choosing open options
Some of the things to look for are:


 * open source license -- see the list at opensource.org
 * open protocols -- using standard Internet protocols so people have a choice of ways to connect to a service or interchange data
 * exportable data -- you can take out your data and it will be in a form you can re-use elsewhere, so you aren't tied to the service
 * minimal user data gathering -- you can use the software/service without providing an obnoxious amount of personal information (for instance, you shouldn't need to disclose your legal name or gender to use most services)

Other things to consider:


 * cross platform -- if the software runs on your desktop, is it available for Windows, OS X, and Linux? On mobile, are clients available for both iOS and Android?
 * accessibility -- the software should be accessible to people with disabilities. See: Accessibility

Plus, of course, the main thing you'll be looking for is the features.

Choosing software options is always a tradeoff. Sometimes different needs will be in tension, for instance there may be no open alternative that is available on all desktop OSes, or the only open option may not be accessible.

Project tracking
After considerable examination of a lot of different project tracking tools, we went with Pivotal Tracker which is not open. However, it was by far the best match for our needs, is free to use for open source projects, provides exports in a readily parseable format, and has a good ecosystem of open source tools and integrations. (More information: Pivotal Tracker)

Version control
Git, our version control system, is open source. However, the place where it's hosted, Github, is a proprietary service. Although it's not open, the distributed nature of git means that there is no lock-in. They also provide an excellent gratis service to open source projects, and are widely used in the open source world (particularly the Ruby world, and we're a Ruby project), which means we benefit from certain network and community effects of being hosted there.

Pairing tools
When Pairing, most of our developers use some form of voice chat and screen sharing. Unfortunately there are not many open, cross-platform options for this.

Our overall policy is to allow any given pair of developers to choose between themselves what works for them.

Voice and video chat
The main choices are Skype, which includes spyware and back door access, and Google+ Hangouts, which restrict access to certain classes of people because they require a full legal name (potentially backed by government ID) to use the service. Both of these services are multi-platform, however.

There are a number of Voice Over IP (VOIP) options available for Linux, however they mostly don't support other OSes. (If anyone has recommendations for good ones, please add them to the Pairing page.)

Screen sharing
At the time of writing, the most common screen sharing tools are TeamViewer and Skype. Both are proprietary and Skype has definite problems (as mentioned above).

However, as with voice chat, many of the open alternatives are Linux only. Again, if you have any particular recommendations, please add them to the Pairing page.

Publicity and outreach
We have a number of tools we use to reach potential Growstuff participants/developers/members. Some are open source and some aren't. The biggest tradeoff with these things is that you have to balance how many people you reach with what you're prepared to put up with to do so.

Twitter
Not open source, but one of the less awful of the proprietary social networks at the time of writing, and has a vast potential audience. We would like to channel our stuff to identi.ca (an open alternative) as well, but at the time of writing their importer/bridge is broken. Various workarounds to this are available (up to and including simply re-posting all tweets as dents by hand), but the tradeoff there is that making extra steps means it's less likely to be used at all.

Dreamwidth
Many of our early contributors are on Dreamwidth (a blogging/journalling/community platform) and it's one of the inspirations for our project. Dreamwidth is open source, platform-neutral, accessible, etc. The downside is that it's not very widely used by the population in general, so it's not a very good mass publicity platform. However, our DW community has an RSS feed and we can use it much as we use any blog. At a later date we may set up an "official" blog on another platform (most likely Wordpress, which is also open source.)

List of areas where Growstuff already uses open alternatives

 * Git (our software version control system) is open source
 * Ruby on Rails, along with all the other parts of the Technology stack that Growstuff software runs on, is open source
 * Our servers run Ubuntu Linux, an open source operating system
 * This wiki runs on mediawiki, which is open source
 * Our Mailing list runs on Mailman, which is open source
 * IRC, our main group chat facility, is based on open protocols and most of the software associated with it is open source