Disroot considering ditching Ethercalc and Framadate

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lanun
Desconectado/a
se unió: 04/01/2021

https://disroot.org/en/blog/news03-2021 - "Future of Framadate and Ethercalc"

The situation regarding Ethercalc is quite clear:
https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc/graphs/code-frequency

Not sure why they write that Framadate is "on life support" too. That simply does not seem to be the case. Framadate is not your average behemoth, it has a rather limited scope and as such has already reached maturity, which probably explains why commits have become less frequent. It just does well what it is intended to do : https://framagit.org/framasoft/framadate/framadate.

I think this might be a more convincing description of the situation:

"A piece of software we really came to love, CryptPad, a complete end-to-end encrypted zero knowledge collaboration suite which powers our https://cryptpad.disroot.org instance, does include poll and spreadsheet features."

That sounds good enough to make a strong case in favor of CryptPad. Not sure whether their love for CryptPad is the reason why they consider Framadate to be "not well maintained". Too bad I cannot access their CryptPad poll about adopting CryptPad for polls (Error: TIMEOUT).

Avron

I am a translator!

Desconectado/a
se unió: 08/18/2020

I haven't tried but based on the description of how to install Framadate, it seems to be feasible on Trisquel 9, only using Framadate and packages in Trisquel's repository.

To install Cryptpad, one apparently needs to use npm which is an alternative package manager. In general, I feel rather ok trusting a server software, with a free software license, whose dependencies are entirely available in the packages of a distro following the FSDG or Debian.

Do you know whether software installed via npm is entirely free software, how well such software is selected and maintained and what the policy of the maintainers of the packages available is? I have seen "node.js" included in the Free Sofware Directory but it is really unclear to me how much this is related to things installed via npm.

lanun
Desconectado/a
se unió: 04/01/2021

I think you would need to check the individual licence of the package of interest, and of its dependencies.

Someone made a superfast check, and it appears that almost all kinds of licences can be found in the licence summary of npm packages - when anything is to be found :
https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/ad3bdc6ca8888599502e

As a general rule, I would trust Disroot to choose free options only, especially in cases where they already have a dedicated tool. I was surprised by their claim that Framadate was "on life support". Maybe something happened that made it less lovable to them, maybe they just want to push for their new love because it would make maintenance easier, or enhance security. There are many other instances of Framadate running, they do not seem to have any concern with the future of the software.

Avron

I am a translator!

Desconectado/a
se unió: 08/18/2020

Thanks for the link about sofware that npm can install.

When I have time, I will try to study a bit more how this package manager works. That said, I am not very enthusiastic about having to use such a thing.