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Show HN: I just made my profitable online form builder open-sourced
- quantumwoke 2y agoCan anyone confirm if the legal advice here https://docs.heyform.net/license https://docs.heyform.net/license is correct? Seems slightly different to my own interpretation of the spirit of GPL.
- nerpderp82 2y agoThey would need to use the AGPL if they want folks that self-host to release their changes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 2y agoI don't know if the page changed, but it says that it is using AGPL
- matt_heimer 2y agoThey did https://github.com/heyform/heyform/commits/main/LICENSE https://github.com/heyform/heyform/commits/main/LICENSE
- bachmeier 2y agoThere's nothing problematic about this, except that it's GPL plus conditions. AFAICT, only the second condition would be in addition to the GPL, but I didn't spend much time thinking about it.
- thih9 2y ago> it's GPL plus conditions Not in a uniform way - the license distributed with the code on github doesn’t have the extra conditions. At this point I’d nuke the repo and force push with AGPL license instead, that seems a better fit.
- jahewson 2y agoGPL does not permit additional conditions, it actually states that additional conditions may be removed by the licensee. In this case, I don’t see the actual license containing additional conditions, simply that the FAQ guidance on the page is misleading.
- renewiltord 2y agoBut it needs attribution and he can say what attribution is valid, no? IANAL so can't say for sure but does GPLv3 have same issue as early CC? https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299 https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...
- jahewson 2y agoYes and no. While the author can specify an attribution notice, the GPL limits it to being relayed amongst “appropriate legal notices” - these typically appear in an EULA or About screen. Otherwise an “inappropriate” attribution requirement could be misused to prevent modification of certain parts of the work. As for the issue with CC, GPLv3 gives a 30 day grace period for rectifying violations which obviates many potential troll issues.
- renewiltord 2y agoThank you.
- sfink 2y agoYeah, it looks wrong to me too. It claims to be GPLv3 and the "use cases" explainer looks like it's trying to clarify what GPLv3 means, but the requirements described under the use cases are not part of GPLv3. The 1st one is fine. The 2nd one says you would need to open source your modifications, but that would only be true if you also distributed your version rather than just using it on the server side. The 3rd adds three conditions. The first and third are again only true if you are redistributing the software. The second is an attribution clause that is not part of GPLv3, and the page to me definitely reads like it's explaining the license but not actually a license itself. GPLv3 does allow adding in similar conditions, but probably not those: I'm not sure requiring a link to the original project is ok. AGPLv3 would be a much closer match to what the author appears to intend. It allows adding the attribution requirements that the author wants; see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html section 7: "You may...supplement the terms...: (b) Requiring preservation of...author attribution..." (IANAL, and every time I claim anything about licenses I get at least one detail wrong.)
- not_your_vase 2y agoWhat's your rationale behind this step?
- dearroy 2y agoIt's to tap into global collaboration for faster innovation, and ensure transparency and trust. Thanks for bringing up the good question!
- MichaelMug 2y agoWould this be a clever way of shrinking the market? Any competitors will now automatically need to have a value proposition greater than this free software.
- atonse 2y agoI'm not OP but the software is GPL3, so it would disqualify a lot of risk-averse customers from hosting it.
- snapcaster 2y agoHow did you think about the tradeoffs between closed-source profitable vs. open sourcing it? What do you see as your criteria for success on this move?
- orliesaurus 2y agodo you consider this a marketing move?
- bberenberg 2y agoConsidering that this is SaaS, are you sure GPL is sufficient here? Did you consider AGPL?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- datascienced 2y agoRisk is low. A copycat can copy but code is only part of the equation.
- thih9 2y agoCongrats on open sourcing your project! I see that it relies on mongodb, at a first glance this seems a good fit for a forms oriented product - looks like using a document db for actually dealing with documents. How did it work out for you? Would you choose it again?
- izwasm 2y agoI really like that you are using nestjs, idk why some devs hate it, IMHO its the best node framework that can be used to build production ready apps, i started using it a month ago at work and it was my first time using it, and it already made so productive
- wouldbecouldbe 2y agoNestJS is nodeJS for Java people. It's like Angular in that sense. So some people will feel like it's over engineered. I mean it's overengineered. Why do I have to register all these things, and why does it keep crashing if I register it like this without any understandable error message. It has a little bit of an OCD relationship with dependency injection. Where the normal import system can handle most of those cases. But few nice things, resolvers, auto-generate swaggers. And TypeORM is lovely. But yeah it's a bit too demanding. I'm okay with an opiniated framework if it gives a lot of features out of the box (like laravel or NextJs), but NestJS tells me how to do things without giving me enough in return. (auth, sockets etc are still quite a lot of work)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mewpmewp2 2y agoYeah, I don't know, most of the time only time you actually need dep injection is for tests, and at that point why not just mock with Jest? Feels too much just having to do all this work just to complicate dependencies and make moving around more difficult for tests when a much simpler solution is available.
- tisdadd 2y agoJust wanted to chime in and say that if you use the CLI to generate things, the experience is much nicer. However, you do still need to be in their playground. If you have a large team out org and don't want to have to document extra about the guts, I love having something proven. If you need to mix protocols, I believe Feathers JS was a little simpler to get into last I looked.
- jraph 2y agoI'm secretly and slowly building a form building application. The idea is that in my association we don't want to rely on Google Forms. And we only want to use open source software. We are using FramaForms which is a bit clunky and doesn't have this feature that updates a spreadsheet automatically. I thought that I could just create something that would answer both concerns. But a good open source forms app would probably change everything, I would gladly stop my small project (in favor of contributing to an existing one for instance). I see there is integration with a lot of products, including Google Drive and Google Sheet. Would an integration with Nextcloud be considered? Congratulations on open sourcing this, we need open source and self hosted form solutions. Critically private data is put in forms and that get sent to big private companies like Google, which is not ideal. As other commenters say, you might want to use AGPL indeed, but I guess you carefully thought this decision.
- blowski 2y ago> But a good open source forms app would probably change everything Can you go into that a bit more, I'm interested what you would see changing. Why do you think it hasn't been done already?
- krisoft 2y agoMy understanding of the comment is that “changing everything” should be understood in the context described by the begining of the comment. That is their organisation would stop using FramaForms, and the commenter would stop working on their replacement skunk project. That is all of those mentioned plans/activities would change drastically. It wouldn’t change literally everything. The Sun and the Earth will continue to orbit around a shared barycenter. Humans will continue to breath oxygen. Carbon will continue to form four covalent bonds per atom. Some boys will continue to think a lot about some girls, etc etc.
- jraph 2y agoYep, I meant this indeed.
- 2y ago
- tamimio 2y agoYour website doesn’t open, it seems it’s flagged in one of the DNS popular blacklists
- zzzzzzzzzz10 2y agoWorks fine for me. Did you add these blacklists yourself or is it from your ISP?
- mderazon 2y agoFor me too, using NextDNS
- scosman 2y ago+1
- dearroy 2y agoIt's strange that our website is being blocked by an ISP. Could you please provide us with the name of the ISP so that we can contact them and request to have the ban lifted?
- la64710 2y agoWhat is the reason for “open sourcing” this , when any meaningful implementation is locked away behind services and is closed source. I just think these kind of use cases confuses users. There is no problem in being closed source and proprietary (unless you are using preexisting open source code and open sourcing those parts of your code makes it legally compliant) . In any case it is confusing at best and misleading at the worst.
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoFree advertising on Haker News. 10 bucks net profit without any grows is also profitable. Getting to the main page of HN was worth open sourcing what had no potential anyway. This is my reasoning, I'm not the creator of this.
- ricardonunez 2y agoUsername checks out.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- winrid 2y agoAs someone that built a 20m ARR survey product... The only difference between this and something making millions is a sales team.
- 2y ago
- sfink 2y agoI've often wanted a simple online form solution for random purposes, yet I have never quite gotten around to learning Google Forms. My kids use it for school stuff. They're reasonably capable with it and have gotten good mileage from it. I guess at some level it's hard for me to get into something that often requires flexibility, yet can't be modified beyond rigidly prescribed boundaries. I would totally rather learn something like this that I can hack on. And when other people ask me how to do something for a Real reason, I would not hesitate to recommend the hosted version if it can do what they want. (No, I don't want to be on the hook for maintaining a self-hosted version of something that will be depended on for wide public consumption. I'm done with pager duty.) The creators' hearts seem to be in the right place, so I'm less subliminally worried that they'll enshittify it in some way that bothers me. And if they do, the license gives me a way to proceed without starting with something new from scratch.
- jmholla 2y agoGoogle Forms is very simple to learn. There's not much to it. You just dive in and you're good to go.
- V__ 2y agoThis looks really nice. I assume you have looked at the alternatives and created heyform with a special feature or use case in mind? If so, could you summarize the differences between heyform and for example: getinput.co, quillforms.com or snoopforms.com?
- heyarviind2 2y agoor https://formlick.com https://formlick.com
- circusfly 2y agoAI thanks you for your efforts.
- _akhe 2y agoAI needs the help honestly. Because it's based on training (from the past, and only what's published that it can get its greedy 6-fingered hands on), it's always going to be behind HI (human intelligence !). OP might have taught it how to make a form builder, but there are a lot other concepts at play here - a lot more than a language engine could spit out about making a form builder - which may or may not even be that accurate or relevant to the context. We'd need other engines, at least. We're in very early stages of AI, early enough that people should be excited about the [human] jobs it necessitates in order to get even close to a threatening point - which, who knows if it will even be a threat by the time that finally happens, if ever.
- Syntaf 2y agoVery cool! Form builders are really fun applications to build and teach you a lot about more advanced relational models (like polymorphic relations) I scrapped together a form-builder-with-payments using RoR and RailsAdmin last year for my club and ended up spinning it off into a pay-per-use SaaS[1]. As it turns out, forms are a fundamental aspect of a LOT of things, and offering free use tools can change the game for clubs or organizations looking to keep their data in one place. [1] https://embolt.app https://embolt.app
- mewpmewp2 2y agoWhat do you mean by club exactly?
- Syntaf 2y agoI generally mean a member based organizations, could be a book club or professional association or anything of the sorts. Not every club charges dues, but those that do generally start off with a google form and a pinky promise that you'll send your dues after submitting the form. Works for awhile but it's hard to maintain, speaking as someone who's had to do this before. embolt is my go at offering a member platform with a very low (the lowest) barrier of entry to getting up and running with paid registrations forms & an admin dashboard.
- replwoacause 2y agoLooks very well done! Did you have to write much JS or could you do everything you needed with RoR?
- Syntaf 2y agoThanks! I initially started out with just jQuery but eventually realized I needed to support more complex interactions and adopted Turbo & Stimulus [1]. Still sticking with server-side rendering though, always loved that approach to building webapps and tools like HTMX & Turbo make it much easier to integrate with complex UX interactions. [1] https://medium.com/@csofiamsousa/hotwire-turbo-and-stimulus-in-a-nutshell-36207c7bbba7 https://medium.com/@csofiamsousa/hotwire-turbo-and-stimulus-...
- hadeshe 2y ago[dead]
- rkuodys 2y agoI cannot quickly find the answer so maybe the project owner can share - I have a need for which apparently there is no ready-to-use product - I need to have form which is anonymous, but at the same time it should be one-time-only submit. (Like voting system). My ideal solution would be to send unique link to each recipient and limit one submission per link. However, I as a purchaser should not be able to see who got which link, or at least, how each link voted. Question if heyform has some implementation of the need already, because none of the well known products - Google forms, MS Forms, Typeform - support anything like that
- thih9 2y agoI doubt any generic platform would support such a specific use case out of the box, especially if major providers don’t offer it.
- eastbound 2y agoEven if it were anonymous, your recipients wouldn’t trust it. Everyone knows anonymous polls get you fired (which is still proof that some people still trust anonymity, but those people are usually not working here anymore).
- thih9 2y agoI was curious and did a google search, looks like you’re right and this can happen; some anecdotes are terrifying: > My manager let me know that due to my answers in the culture survey, they didn't think I was a good fit for the company anymore and were letting me go. > said that my responses to the survey showed that I had a negative attitude about the company and that they wanted to part ways. source: https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/67j04o/i_was_fired_from_my_job_after_filling_out_an/?rdt=48101 https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/67j04o/i_was_f...
- snvzz 2y agoHuge Affero (AGPL) warning. Do not touch unless you understand how the license works and want to do so anyway.
- thih9 2y agoCan you be more specific? In what ways exactly it is more dangerous than other open source licenses in this case?
- chii 2y ago> more dangerous only if you intend to produce a derivative work for which you intend to sell, and thus do not want to reveal said derivative to others. AGPL is the best license available for open source imho.
- thih9 2y agoThat was my understanding too, I don’t understand how this would be seen as dangerous in this context, I’d also view it as a benefit.
- frabcus 2y agoI see this as huge Affero (AGPL) praise! It would be great if the license was used more. I'd much rather contribute to something where sharealike extends in some way across networks - software doesn't link in binaries, as the GPL does cover, as much these days.
- p_l 2y agoGPL never talked about linking, it's probably the single most misunderstood aspect of GPL. You can in fact have GPL bw applied over network IPC even
- dgellow 2y agoSee their docs page here: https://docs.heyform.net/license https://docs.heyform.net/license
- tomfreemax 2y agoLooks really cool and could be a good alternative to Typeform. In our organization, due to privacy reasons we need to self host. You might want to look at something like the plus plan photoprism has. For photoprism, if you want a UI for user admin, you pay something. One can do the same thing from cli, but in corporate environments it's easier for me to say, look, we need to pay, because we need this admin interface. If I would self host but want to support you otherwise, it's hard to argue why the organization should "donate" money. Hope it makes sense. Best wishes!
- jdaviescoates 2y agoI currently use NocoDB for forms, which works great, but this looks great too, many thanks for sharing!
- jdaviescoates 2y ago@dearroy in fact, it'd be great if you integrated with NocoDB! I was a little disappointed to see that at present you mostly only integrate with proprietary tools and not with other self-hostable tools.
- dearroy 2y agoYou request it, we make it! Please open an issue and let's discuss it further. With any luck, we can make it available in just a few weeks.
- youngbum 2y agoCool
- whitefang 2y agoThis is neat. I'm building Formester and it is a lot of work to keep up a good form builder. Wish you all the best.
- luanxr2000 2y agoGood job for the open source survey form app!
- saasxyz 2y agoThis is cool. Are you an open startup by any chance? if yes, I would love to check out that page to learn more about your operation costs and revenue.
- beniaminp 2y ago[dead]
- stuckkeys 2y ago@dearroy what chat support service do you use? I always find them useful.