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This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company th

by deepuj 10y ago

This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.

vecter 10y ago
Can you put in concrete terms why you see this as a problem?
- creativityhurts 10y ago
  Atlassian will most likely "sunset" Trello or somehow include it in JIRA.
  - vecter 10y ago
    That's an incredibly wild claim that they would sunset it after they just spent $425 million to buy it. Why would you think that? Also, the might include it or leave it separate. They might even include it and still keep it a great product.
    - bandrami 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
  - harigov 10y ago
    Atlassian isn't Google or FB that they can buy something for $425M and then sunset the product. It is more likely that they will probably provide Trello as an option for their users to better manage their projects.
  - cialowicz 10y ago
    They don't really have a history of doing that. Greenhopper was acquired and integrated into JIRA as JIRA Agile. Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products (JIRA, Bamboo, Confluence, etc). My guess is they'll keep Trello running for a while as-is, and slowly rework it to become "JIRA Lite". It will likely have Trello-like functionality with JIRA branding, and some sort of migration path to the heavier JIRA for companies that have grown a lot.
    - briandear 10y ago
      Hipchat is a piece of shit. Inline code highlighting anyone? /code is crap. Slack has more speed, better integrations, better search, reliability. (For example, getting notifications on iOS. I hate HipChat. Apologies to those that love it, but it's likely you never used both side-by-side during normal working days to compare. So if Atlassian tried to put their mark on Trello, I have little confidence that it will still be Trello.
      - cialowicz 10y ago
        I used HipChat for two and a half years in a previous role, and have been using Slack daily for the past 7 months in my current role. Both are fine. HipChat is certainly not perfect, but I don't agree about Slack being faster. It definitely has its issues.
    - mrbill 10y ago
      > Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products Except for when you run into a bug that requires disabling of the Hipchat integration with Confluence... You'd think a company could make its own products work together better.
  - farkas 10y ago
    We have no plans to sunset Trello. Trello is an incredible product, and an incredible brand, with an amazing team behind it. Atlassian's product range today includes unstructured (Confluence) and structured (JIRA) products. Trello fits right in the middle. It has a myriad of use-cases[1] and is loved by the millions who use it daily. [1] - https://trello.com/inspiration https://trello.com/inspiration Scott, CEO Atlassian
    - briandear 10y ago
      For now. I've heard this all before.
    - aclsid 10y ago
      Whatever you do, just make sure you always keep a functional free tier. I can tell you that for for us, as far as Bitbucket and Trello is concerned, the free tier is what got us in before purchasing a plan several months later. AWS applies the same trick with some startups in China (like they did with us) and I guess Silicon Valley as well. Bunch of free credits, free for a year. After you have your infrastructure with them it will be hard to switch to somebody else.
    - dukedougal 10y ago
      @farkas I know this is off topic - but whilst you are here can I ask you a question? If we have built a product that is a (we think) great fit to the Atlassian customer base, who would we speak to in order to create a partnering arrangement with Atlassian? Does Atlassian do such business partnering arrangements? It's not an addon for an Atlassian product so does not seem to fit to the Atlassian marketplace.
      - dukedougal 10y ago
        Downvoted for what reason? I would have thought that making business connections on HN is just exactly the right thing to be doing.....
    - petetnt 10y ago
      I thought Bitbucket Cards[1] was the middle product, heh. [1] - http://www.bitbucketcards.com/ http://www.bitbucketcards.com/
  - iamaelephant 10y ago
    I don't have any information one way or another but to my knowledge Atlassian has never done this with an acquisition.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dilap 10y ago
  Companies create software that reflects their structure and culture. The software that Atlassian makes is radically different -- and opposed in spirit -- to Trello. I think Trello will inevitably lose its Trello-ness. Hope to be wrong though!
  - RUG3Y 10y ago
    I hope you're wrong too! I use Trello a lot, and I also use Jira a lot. I would much rather use Trello than Jira.
brianbreslin 10y ago
JIRA interface blows. However you're looking at it from a very selfish standpoint. The Trello team has probably been working on this for years with the explicit goal of an exit, better to get bought by likeminded product people and make a big return than to be bought by Google and have the product killed entirely.
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  He's a customer.
  - brianbreslin 10y ago
    Oh I get that. Do you think they should never sell? What's the optimal outcome in your opinion?
- logn 10y ago
  The new sprint-related features in Jira are pretty good and actually remind me of Trello.
  - parthdesai 10y ago
    Jira's interface itself is so clunky and it is so slow.
- aclsid 10y ago
  Dude, go read the dev docs. Trello is not vaporware to make a quick profit. They kind of started that as a pet project and even them were impressed that it picked up that quickly. To the point where they had to fall back to some polling code because their webhook stuff was failing. Pretty nice story if you care to read it.
toddmorey 10y ago
If they are smart, they'll pull a Facebook / Instagram and just leave it to continue working. Also, I'd say a large percentage of Trello users are outside of the classical Jira camp, so Atlassian should be really careful with the new baby. I believe they will be.
wsy 10y ago
For sure they won't change Trello to become like JIRA, and there is a little hope the JIRA UI will become more like Trello. So IMHO nothing to worry about.
- dickbasedregex 10y ago
  I can see the clunky from Jira seeping into Trello over time. Especially if some of the devs weren't part of a package deal. I like Jira but I understand why others aren't fond of it. I'd argue it completely depends on how you configure/use Jira. Administering it is annoying regardless though.
RUG3Y 10y ago
I don't blame Trello for selling but I'm not looking forward to whatever Atlassian could do to the product. I use Atlassian at work and I dislike their software, though it's not all bad.
- jupp0r 10y ago
  Just out of geniune curiosity: what's not bad?
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    JIRA can do anything. LITERALLY. The configuration of a new JIRA server, projects, etc is insane. It just doesn't do anything explicitly well IMO. It's also crazy slow and their enterprise hosted version still has maintenance outages which, as a software developer in 2017, I find absolutely appalling.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      |their enterprise hosted version still has maintenance outages Even WoW doesn't really do that anymore :)
    - RUG3Y 10y ago
      The fact that JIRA is so configurable is what's annoying. I spend way to much time fiddling with options and settings when I want the damn thing to just work so that I can get on to important things.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - RUG3Y 10y ago
    It's not that I think JIRA is good per se, but it gets the job done, just like lots of other clunky enterprise software out there.
mhp 10y ago
The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up. Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview. "During the interview, Simons took time to assure me that Atlassian wouldn’t ruin Trello." http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-beloved-trello-for-425-million/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-bel... (disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda. 1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with Atlassian. I'm skeptical. I've yet to see this work out with a company I worked at or followed (yes yes I know, Instagram but I never followed them so I wouldn't know how or if they've changed). I'm sure it can and has happened. But you have an uphill battle :)
  - misiti3780 10y ago
    it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      How many handcuffs have expired?
      - mooreds 10y ago
        It has been over 4 years, so I imagine most of them have. http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-facebook-bought-instagram-for-1-billion-heres-how-co-founder-kevin-systrom-spent-it-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...
latj 10y ago
What do you like instead of Jira? I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.
- briandear 10y ago
  I hate bitbucket. $12 or so per month for private repos is an extremely small price to pay for an infinitely better UX, better integrations and just all all around better experience. For a tool I use multiple times per hour, "free" doesn't matter much to me. Github isn't perfect, but it's damned close. As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me. There's so much focus on 'control' that I feel like a victim every time I use it. For example, if I want to move a card from In Progress to the Backlog, Jira has an option to restrict the non-anointed from moving cards. So I have to get 'permission' from someone with the right privileges to move a card. Jira is a micro-manager's wet dream. Trello was the anti-Jira and that's what made it great.
  - himlion 10y ago
    That depends how you set it up though. In our team at a big telco everybody has normal usage rights. In my experience it never gets abused and doesn't give people this powerless feeling.
  - latj 10y ago
    "As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me." Yeah, this is a pretty common sentiment. Jira is not a great tool, but the things devs really resent is being micromanaged and tracked in such a way that they are turned into a commodity. At the end of the day, if that really bothers you, there are plenty of ways to work free of this feeling- find a company that fits you better or a better manager within your company or strike out on your own. A better ticketing system wont make you happy.
    - 10y ago
tiglionabbit 10y ago
Nearly every company I've worked for eventually brings in the Atlassian bullshit despite my protest. It usually begins with hiring some project manager who likes Atlassian and forces the hire of an Atlassian shill to configure Atlassian products full time, but it never becomes any good. They pry us off our existing issue tracker and wiki (github, trac) and force us to use that awful content-editable-based wiki that destroys the document differently in every browser, then tell us not to use Chrome because clearly Chrome is the problem. Witch-hunts begin about who screwed up the wiki formatting. Everything breaks if you press the back button. And then inevitably somebody forgot to give somebody permission for something and now everyone with permission is out of town so nothing can be done. You can get a better wysiwyg wiki just by sharing a folder in Google Docs and having them link to each other. And I'd take Trello over "greenhopper" any day.
- allover 10y ago
  This probably doesn't need saying, but seems you work in toxic teams. Your first paragraph suggests a ton of blame is being thrown about. If you work at a company like that, get out. (That of course, or you suck at empathy for your managers, and you're the problem). The place I work at, Jira is used pretty reasonably. Our devs, in 2 different teams have setup the workflows to show our progress and deployment flow in ways we prefer. The project managers use those workflows happily, they just want them to reflect reality. I'd rather use Trello, but honestly I'm trying to communicate the work I've done to my proj. managers, so the right tool is basically whatever works for them, not me.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > If you work at a company like that, get out. IME, this is most teams. If you get out you are likely moving into another team that's much the same.
    - tiglionabbit 10y ago
      Yep. I tended to get into a bunch of early-stage startups. They used to be cool, then they brought in some new management. You never know what things are going to turn into.
Confusion 10y ago
I really don't understand all the hate on Atlassian. We're a small company (< 20) and we like Jira. There's nothing that offers near the same functionality. It's worth every penny. We also used and liked Crucible (their code review tool), but it didn't yet offer some features of Gerrit that were very important to us, so we moved to Gerrit.
rsp1984 10y ago
SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck. If you compare SourceTree to other halfway modern git clients (like Tower or GitX-dev), oh boy does it suck! The layout is completely disorganized, the diffing is super lousy. It's slow. It sucks up lots of memory. It's literally the last GUI client I'd use before just going to the command line.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  +1 I have to use it over a VM :-(. Commit time is coffee time.
- aclsid 10y ago
  Did not know about GitX. Will still rely on the command line over here, but it is nice to know there is a free tool to give to less technical people that is faster.
- sb8244 10y ago
  I switched to SourceTree after GitX (not dev but another fork) kept crashing. I haven't looked back. It's a great client and I haven't had any problems with it. I'm working on decently sized repos but keep a pretty clean flow.
- melvinmt 10y ago
  Ah, I almost forgot about GitX, my first git GUI client before I started using git gui itself.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Second that Tower is so much more Mac-like than SourceTree. On a non-Mac platform, SourceTree would probably be my pick for a git GUI though.
aclsid 10y ago
Don't know what kind of stuff you are using over there, but Bitbucket has been fantastic for us for over a year already. About to start trying their Bamboo service. At most, this is welcome news if they manage to integrate Trello with Jira somehow.
- allover 10y ago
  Bamboo (cloud) is end-of-lifed so you might want to reconsider that purchase! (Pipelines is their new alternative). (Yes you could buy the Bamboo self-hosted thing, which they're still supporting, but it's clear where their efforts are going at this point). EDIT: Also, I should add some opinion here. We used to use Bamboo for 2+ years and ditched it (for Jenkins). Bamboo has a horrible UI, and everything basically has to be done through UI. Jenkins meanwhile has an ugly UI, but you can do everything via config/Jenkinsfile, which is what these newer CI things incl. Pipelines are aiming at also, basically the `ci.yaml` file in your repo idea. So yeah, avoid Bamboo!
  - i386 10y ago
    I hope you don't think our (Jenkins) UI is ugly now ;) We've recently launched the Jenkins Blue Ocean project that aims to modernize the developer experience and UI https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/ https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/
    - allover 10y ago
      Hehe, thanks for replying. We're pretty hyped about Blue Ocean, and have it installed already, just eagerly awaiting for it to have all the functionality of the Jenkins of old, best of luck to you with it :)
      - i386 10y ago
        No worries! Ahh what are you missing? drop be a line at jdumay@cloudbees.com
    - emmelaich 10y ago
amelius 10y ago
> This is depressing. Yes, I often long back to the days when you could just put software on a floppy disk and be sure that it would never change. That this isn't practically possible anymore is one of the biggest downsides of the cloud.
- aclsid 10y ago
  The one thing I have learned in the computer world after almost two decades on this stuff is that you should never rely on things being constant. Tools will keep changing, and it will be a repeating cycle. I saw it with Delphi, VC6, VB6, QuarkXpress (sis is a designer), etc. About the only thing that has had massive longevity is VIM, and at least for me, its throne was taken away by SublimeText. Maybe Atom will replace it or something else, who knows. But in the end, just enjoy the ride while it lasts.
ChildOfChaos 10y ago
Surely this is not an issue though, if they do, some teenager in there bedroom will make a clone in a fortnight or less, Trello is great but it's very simple software.
hoodoof 10y ago
What about celebrating this as a success? All these negative comments and hand wringing about Trello being ruined sounds like whining entitlement. Atlassian is a fabulously successful independently run company that you should be happy bought Trello. For goodness sake all you haters in this thread make it sound like Trello was acquired by Trump Corporation or The Empire or something.
- photogrammetry 10y ago
  But, how are posters on HN supposed to get upvotes if they don't say something alarming/negative? Positive comments are explicitly discouraged in the "community guidelines." Perhaps we should consider whether sama or pg had a greater influence on that.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - fuck_google 10y ago
    Negative comments likewise. It's starting to feel almost like Stack Overflow, i.e. opinions and conversation discouraged, especially if the moderators do not understand your point.
- ygmelnikova 10y ago
  "make it sound like Trello was acquired by Trump Corporation or The Empire" Who's the hater now?
jimbokun 10y ago
I'm very satisfied using JIRA and Confluence at work. Are there better alternatives out there I just don't know about?
- allover 10y ago
  Honestly yeah I'd like to hear this answer. For a wiki especially, our team spent ages searching for one that was hosted, private and searchable. Confluence seemed like the only thing with a decent search. Major drawback of Confluence I've found is that Markdown is not first class, and only supported via some shitty plugin, that renders badly to boot. But the rest of the company (and half my tech team for that matter) doesn't really care about that (the default wysiwyg stuff looks good if you stick to the guard rails). Still, we're not aware of a better thing we could move to?
  - acidburnNSA 10y ago
    Phabricator is pretty good for issue tracking and code review. The wiki is totally usable but not as polished as Confluence.
- purerandomness 10y ago
  Taiga, Gitlab, ...
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Yes, several. GitHub + ZenHub is another nice combo.
veidr 10y ago
Yeah. I would just add that Atlassian didn't make SourceTree either; Steve Streeting did, and they bought it. He worked on it at Atlassian for a while, then left. After that, SourceTree has been slowly starting to suck. It has a bunch of annoying new bugs that don't get fixed, now requires logging into Atlassian to use it on every machine you use, and has had almost no useful or compelling feature additions in recent years. It is basically a good indie app from several years ago, with the Atlassian taint slowly being applied to it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
foxylad 10y ago
I'm happy - I use both Trello and Bitbucket. Atlassian bought Bitbucket years ago, and it's only got better since then. If the pattern persists, I think we'll see Trello remain largely as it is, but with added hooks to Atlassian's other products.
manyxcxi 10y ago
I don't get this. Except for HipChat, (and I'd argue SourceTree), how exactly does Atlassian kill/destroy things? I have yet to use another ticket system for software development that is as decent to use as JIRA. I'm not saying I love it, but I've done my time with all the usual suspects and I CHOSE JIRA for my company. I found most people who have really hated JIRA for a good reason actually hated the borked workflow that their administrators put them into. BitBucket has been a great private hosted Git repository for us, we have at least 150+ repositories- the addition of 'Projects' has adequately solved my biggest complaint. Confluence is fine as far as intranet wikis go, the fact that it's somewhat integrated with JIRA and BitBucket makes it work fine. We tried using Google Pages- never again. Our documentation is easily discoverable and content authoring is easy. We don't try and run anything publicly so our use case is dead simple.
trymas 10y ago
IMHO, more depressing thing is the price tag. I am far from expert when it comes to startups, their evaluations and acquisitions, but isn't >1million daily active users [1] not enough to make Trello a billion dollar unicorn? What Trello lacked to reach this? Is it all about the user count and it does not matter they pay or not or you have monetisation strategy or not? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trello#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trello#History
bigbugbag 10y ago
Sadly this is more often than not the destiny of service and software you can't host/run yourself. At least this is not google or the like buying something to can it. Though it would not be surprising if trello got merged or integrated in some way in jira. Luckily there are free software alternatives to trello you can self host that are not going to sell out such as wekan[1], taskboard[2], taiga[3], kanboard[4], ... [1]: https://wekan.io/ https://wekan.io/ [2]: https://taskboard.matthewross.me/ https://taskboard.matthewross.me/ [3]: http://taiga.pm/ http://taiga.pm/ [4]: https://kanboard.net/ https://kanboard.net/

by deepuj 10y ago

vecter 10y ago

Can you put in concrete terms why you see this as a problem?

creativityhurts 10y ago
Atlassian will most likely "sunset" Trello or somehow include it in JIRA.
- vecter 10y ago
  That's an incredibly wild claim that they would sunset it after they just spent $425 million to buy it. Why would you think that? Also, the might include it or leave it separate. They might even include it and still keep it a great product.
  - bandrami 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- harigov 10y ago
  Atlassian isn't Google or FB that they can buy something for $425M and then sunset the product. It is more likely that they will probably provide Trello as an option for their users to better manage their projects.
- cialowicz 10y ago
  They don't really have a history of doing that. Greenhopper was acquired and integrated into JIRA as JIRA Agile. Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products (JIRA, Bamboo, Confluence, etc). My guess is they'll keep Trello running for a while as-is, and slowly rework it to become "JIRA Lite". It will likely have Trello-like functionality with JIRA branding, and some sort of migration path to the heavier JIRA for companies that have grown a lot.
  - briandear 10y ago
    Hipchat is a piece of shit. Inline code highlighting anyone? /code is crap. Slack has more speed, better integrations, better search, reliability. (For example, getting notifications on iOS. I hate HipChat. Apologies to those that love it, but it's likely you never used both side-by-side during normal working days to compare. So if Atlassian tried to put their mark on Trello, I have little confidence that it will still be Trello.
    - cialowicz 10y ago
      I used HipChat for two and a half years in a previous role, and have been using Slack daily for the past 7 months in my current role. Both are fine. HipChat is certainly not perfect, but I don't agree about Slack being faster. It definitely has its issues.
  - mrbill 10y ago
    > Hipchat was acquired and now it lives on and nicely integrates with nearly all Atlassian products Except for when you run into a bug that requires disabling of the Hipchat integration with Confluence... You'd think a company could make its own products work together better.
- farkas 10y ago
  We have no plans to sunset Trello. Trello is an incredible product, and an incredible brand, with an amazing team behind it. Atlassian's product range today includes unstructured (Confluence) and structured (JIRA) products. Trello fits right in the middle. It has a myriad of use-cases[1] and is loved by the millions who use it daily. [1] - https://trello.com/inspiration https://trello.com/inspiration Scott, CEO Atlassian
  - briandear 10y ago
    For now. I've heard this all before.
  - aclsid 10y ago
    Whatever you do, just make sure you always keep a functional free tier. I can tell you that for for us, as far as Bitbucket and Trello is concerned, the free tier is what got us in before purchasing a plan several months later. AWS applies the same trick with some startups in China (like they did with us) and I guess Silicon Valley as well. Bunch of free credits, free for a year. After you have your infrastructure with them it will be hard to switch to somebody else.
  - dukedougal 10y ago
    @farkas I know this is off topic - but whilst you are here can I ask you a question? If we have built a product that is a (we think) great fit to the Atlassian customer base, who would we speak to in order to create a partnering arrangement with Atlassian? Does Atlassian do such business partnering arrangements? It's not an addon for an Atlassian product so does not seem to fit to the Atlassian marketplace.
    - dukedougal 10y ago
      Downvoted for what reason? I would have thought that making business connections on HN is just exactly the right thing to be doing.....
  - petetnt 10y ago
    I thought Bitbucket Cards[1] was the middle product, heh. [1] - http://www.bitbucketcards.com/ http://www.bitbucketcards.com/
- iamaelephant 10y ago
  I don't have any information one way or another but to my knowledge Atlassian has never done this with an acquisition.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dilap 10y ago
Companies create software that reflects their structure and culture. The software that Atlassian makes is radically different -- and opposed in spirit -- to Trello. I think Trello will inevitably lose its Trello-ness. Hope to be wrong though!
- RUG3Y 10y ago
  I hope you're wrong too! I use Trello a lot, and I also use Jira a lot. I would much rather use Trello than Jira.

brianbreslin 10y ago

JIRA interface blows. However you're looking at it from a very selfish standpoint. The Trello team has probably been working on this for years with the explicit goal of an exit, better to get bought by likeminded product people and make a big return than to be bought by Google and have the product killed entirely.

jknoepfler 10y ago
He's a customer.
- brianbreslin 10y ago
  Oh I get that. Do you think they should never sell? What's the optimal outcome in your opinion?
logn 10y ago
The new sprint-related features in Jira are pretty good and actually remind me of Trello.
- parthdesai 10y ago
  Jira's interface itself is so clunky and it is so slow.
aclsid 10y ago
Dude, go read the dev docs. Trello is not vaporware to make a quick profit. They kind of started that as a pet project and even them were impressed that it picked up that quickly. To the point where they had to fall back to some polling code because their webhook stuff was failing. Pretty nice story if you care to read it.

toddmorey 10y ago

If they are smart, they'll pull a Facebook / Instagram and just leave it to continue working. Also, I'd say a large percentage of Trello users are outside of the classical Jira camp, so Atlassian should be really careful with the new baby. I believe they will be.

wsy 10y ago

For sure they won't change Trello to become like JIRA, and there is a little hope the JIRA UI will become more like Trello. So IMHO nothing to worry about.

dickbasedregex 10y ago
I can see the clunky from Jira seeping into Trello over time. Especially if some of the devs weren't part of a package deal. I like Jira but I understand why others aren't fond of it. I'd argue it completely depends on how you configure/use Jira. Administering it is annoying regardless though.

RUG3Y 10y ago

I don't blame Trello for selling but I'm not looking forward to whatever Atlassian could do to the product. I use Atlassian at work and I dislike their software, though it's not all bad.

jupp0r 10y ago
Just out of geniune curiosity: what's not bad?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  JIRA can do anything. LITERALLY. The configuration of a new JIRA server, projects, etc is insane. It just doesn't do anything explicitly well IMO. It's also crazy slow and their enterprise hosted version still has maintenance outages which, as a software developer in 2017, I find absolutely appalling.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    |their enterprise hosted version still has maintenance outages Even WoW doesn't really do that anymore :)
  - RUG3Y 10y ago
    The fact that JIRA is so configurable is what's annoying. I spend way to much time fiddling with options and settings when I want the damn thing to just work so that I can get on to important things.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- RUG3Y 10y ago
  It's not that I think JIRA is good per se, but it gets the job done, just like lots of other clunky enterprise software out there.

mhp 10y ago

The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up. Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview. "During the interview, Simons took time to assure me that Atlassian wouldn’t ruin Trello." http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-beloved-trello-for-425-million/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-bel... (disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It always starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda. 1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with Atlassian. I'm skeptical. I've yet to see this work out with a company I worked at or followed (yes yes I know, Instagram but I never followed them so I wouldn't know how or if they've changed). I'm sure it can and has happened. But you have an uphill battle :)
- misiti3780 10y ago
  it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    How many handcuffs have expired?
    - mooreds 10y ago
      It has been over 4 years, so I imagine most of them have. http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-facebook-bought-instagram-for-1-billion-heres-how-co-founder-kevin-systrom-spent-it-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...

latj 10y ago

What do you like instead of Jira? I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.

briandear 10y ago
I hate bitbucket. $12 or so per month for private repos is an extremely small price to pay for an infinitely better UX, better integrations and just all all around better experience. For a tool I use multiple times per hour, "free" doesn't matter much to me. Github isn't perfect, but it's damned close. As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me. There's so much focus on 'control' that I feel like a victim every time I use it. For example, if I want to move a card from In Progress to the Backlog, Jira has an option to restrict the non-anointed from moving cards. So I have to get 'permission' from someone with the right privileges to move a card. Jira is a micro-manager's wet dream. Trello was the anti-Jira and that's what made it great.
- himlion 10y ago
  That depends how you set it up though. In our team at a big telco everybody has normal usage rights. In my experience it never gets abused and doesn't give people this powerless feeling.
- latj 10y ago
  "As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me." Yeah, this is a pretty common sentiment. Jira is not a great tool, but the things devs really resent is being micromanaged and tracked in such a way that they are turned into a commodity. At the end of the day, if that really bothers you, there are plenty of ways to work free of this feeling- find a company that fits you better or a better manager within your company or strike out on your own. A better ticketing system wont make you happy.
  - 10y ago

tiglionabbit 10y ago

Nearly every company I've worked for eventually brings in the Atlassian bullshit despite my protest. It usually begins with hiring some project manager who likes Atlassian and forces the hire of an Atlassian shill to configure Atlassian products full time, but it never becomes any good. They pry us off our existing issue tracker and wiki (github, trac) and force us to use that awful content-editable-based wiki that destroys the document differently in every browser, then tell us not to use Chrome because clearly Chrome is the problem. Witch-hunts begin about who screwed up the wiki formatting. Everything breaks if you press the back button. And then inevitably somebody forgot to give somebody permission for something and now everyone with permission is out of town so nothing can be done. You can get a better wysiwyg wiki just by sharing a folder in Google Docs and having them link to each other. And I'd take Trello over "greenhopper" any day.

allover 10y ago
This probably doesn't need saying, but seems you work in toxic teams. Your first paragraph suggests a ton of blame is being thrown about. If you work at a company like that, get out. (That of course, or you suck at empathy for your managers, and you're the problem). The place I work at, Jira is used pretty reasonably. Our devs, in 2 different teams have setup the workflows to show our progress and deployment flow in ways we prefer. The project managers use those workflows happily, they just want them to reflect reality. I'd rather use Trello, but honestly I'm trying to communicate the work I've done to my proj. managers, so the right tool is basically whatever works for them, not me.
- flukus 10y ago
  > If you work at a company like that, get out. IME, this is most teams. If you get out you are likely moving into another team that's much the same.
  - tiglionabbit 10y ago
    Yep. I tended to get into a bunch of early-stage startups. They used to be cool, then they brought in some new management. You never know what things are going to turn into.

Confusion 10y ago

I really don't understand all the hate on Atlassian. We're a small company (< 20) and we like Jira. There's nothing that offers near the same functionality. It's worth every penny. We also used and liked Crucible (their code review tool), but it didn't yet offer some features of Gerrit that were very important to us, so we moved to Gerrit.

rsp1984 10y ago

SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck. If you compare SourceTree to other halfway modern git clients (like Tower or GitX-dev), oh boy does it suck! The layout is completely disorganized, the diffing is super lousy. It's slow. It sucks up lots of memory. It's literally the last GUI client I'd use before just going to the command line.

bbcbasic 10y ago
+1 I have to use it over a VM :-(. Commit time is coffee time.
aclsid 10y ago
Did not know about GitX. Will still rely on the command line over here, but it is nice to know there is a free tool to give to less technical people that is faster.
sb8244 10y ago
I switched to SourceTree after GitX (not dev but another fork) kept crashing. I haven't looked back. It's a great client and I haven't had any problems with it. I'm working on decently sized repos but keep a pretty clean flow.
melvinmt 10y ago
Ah, I almost forgot about GitX, my first git GUI client before I started using git gui itself.
tedmiston 10y ago
Second that Tower is so much more Mac-like than SourceTree. On a non-Mac platform, SourceTree would probably be my pick for a git GUI though.

aclsid 10y ago

Don't know what kind of stuff you are using over there, but Bitbucket has been fantastic for us for over a year already. About to start trying their Bamboo service. At most, this is welcome news if they manage to integrate Trello with Jira somehow.

allover 10y ago
Bamboo (cloud) is end-of-lifed so you might want to reconsider that purchase! (Pipelines is their new alternative). (Yes you could buy the Bamboo self-hosted thing, which they're still supporting, but it's clear where their efforts are going at this point). EDIT: Also, I should add some opinion here. We used to use Bamboo for 2+ years and ditched it (for Jenkins). Bamboo has a horrible UI, and everything basically has to be done through UI. Jenkins meanwhile has an ugly UI, but you can do everything via config/Jenkinsfile, which is what these newer CI things incl. Pipelines are aiming at also, basically the `ci.yaml` file in your repo idea. So yeah, avoid Bamboo!
- i386 10y ago
  I hope you don't think our (Jenkins) UI is ugly now ;) We've recently launched the Jenkins Blue Ocean project that aims to modernize the developer experience and UI https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/ https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/
  - allover 10y ago
    Hehe, thanks for replying. We're pretty hyped about Blue Ocean, and have it installed already, just eagerly awaiting for it to have all the functionality of the Jenkins of old, best of luck to you with it :)
    - i386 10y ago
      No worries! Ahh what are you missing? drop be a line at jdumay@cloudbees.com
  - emmelaich 10y ago

amelius 10y ago

> This is depressing. Yes, I often long back to the days when you could just put software on a floppy disk and be sure that it would never change. That this isn't practically possible anymore is one of the biggest downsides of the cloud.

aclsid 10y ago
The one thing I have learned in the computer world after almost two decades on this stuff is that you should never rely on things being constant. Tools will keep changing, and it will be a repeating cycle. I saw it with Delphi, VC6, VB6, QuarkXpress (sis is a designer), etc. About the only thing that has had massive longevity is VIM, and at least for me, its throne was taken away by SublimeText. Maybe Atom will replace it or something else, who knows. But in the end, just enjoy the ride while it lasts.

ChildOfChaos 10y ago

Surely this is not an issue though, if they do, some teenager in there bedroom will make a clone in a fortnight or less, Trello is great but it's very simple software.

hoodoof 10y ago

What about celebrating this as a success? All these negative comments and hand wringing about Trello being ruined sounds like whining entitlement. Atlassian is a fabulously successful independently run company that you should be happy bought Trello. For goodness sake all you haters in this thread make it sound like Trello was acquired by Trump Corporation or The Empire or something.

photogrammetry 10y ago
But, how are posters on HN supposed to get upvotes if they don't say something alarming/negative? Positive comments are explicitly discouraged in the "community guidelines." Perhaps we should consider whether sama or pg had a greater influence on that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fuck_google 10y ago
  Negative comments likewise. It's starting to feel almost like Stack Overflow, i.e. opinions and conversation discouraged, especially if the moderators do not understand your point.
ygmelnikova 10y ago
"make it sound like Trello was acquired by Trump Corporation or The Empire" Who's the hater now?

jimbokun 10y ago

I'm very satisfied using JIRA and Confluence at work. Are there better alternatives out there I just don't know about?

allover 10y ago
Honestly yeah I'd like to hear this answer. For a wiki especially, our team spent ages searching for one that was hosted, private and searchable. Confluence seemed like the only thing with a decent search. Major drawback of Confluence I've found is that Markdown is not first class, and only supported via some shitty plugin, that renders badly to boot. But the rest of the company (and half my tech team for that matter) doesn't really care about that (the default wysiwyg stuff looks good if you stick to the guard rails). Still, we're not aware of a better thing we could move to?
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Phabricator is pretty good for issue tracking and code review. The wiki is totally usable but not as polished as Confluence.
purerandomness 10y ago
Taiga, Gitlab, ...
tedmiston 10y ago
Yes, several. GitHub + ZenHub is another nice combo.

veidr 10y ago

Yeah. I would just add that Atlassian didn't make SourceTree either; Steve Streeting did, and they bought it. He worked on it at Atlassian for a while, then left. After that, SourceTree has been slowly starting to suck. It has a bunch of annoying new bugs that don't get fixed, now requires logging into Atlassian to use it on every machine you use, and has had almost no useful or compelling feature additions in recent years. It is basically a good indie app from several years ago, with the Atlassian taint slowly being applied to it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

foxylad 10y ago

I'm happy - I use both Trello and Bitbucket. Atlassian bought Bitbucket years ago, and it's only got better since then. If the pattern persists, I think we'll see Trello remain largely as it is, but with added hooks to Atlassian's other products.

manyxcxi 10y ago

I don't get this. Except for HipChat, (and I'd argue SourceTree), how exactly does Atlassian kill/destroy things? I have yet to use another ticket system for software development that is as decent to use as JIRA. I'm not saying I love it, but I've done my time with all the usual suspects and I CHOSE JIRA for my company. I found most people who have really hated JIRA for a good reason actually hated the borked workflow that their administrators put them into. BitBucket has been a great private hosted Git repository for us, we have at least 150+ repositories- the addition of 'Projects' has adequately solved my biggest complaint. Confluence is fine as far as intranet wikis go, the fact that it's somewhat integrated with JIRA and BitBucket makes it work fine. We tried using Google Pages- never again. Our documentation is easily discoverable and content authoring is easy. We don't try and run anything publicly so our use case is dead simple.

trymas 10y ago

IMHO, more depressing thing is the price tag. I am far from expert when it comes to startups, their evaluations and acquisitions, but isn't >1million daily active users [1] not enough to make Trello a billion dollar unicorn? What Trello lacked to reach this? Is it all about the user count and it does not matter they pay or not or you have monetisation strategy or not? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trello#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trello#History

bigbugbag 10y ago

Sadly this is more often than not the destiny of service and software you can't host/run yourself. At least this is not google or the like buying something to can it. Though it would not be surprising if trello got merged or integrated in some way in jira. Luckily there are free software alternatives to trello you can self host that are not going to sell out such as wekan[1], taskboard[2], taiga[3], kanboard[4], ... [1]: https://wekan.io/ https://wekan.io/ [2]: https://taskboard.matthewross.me/ https://taskboard.matthewross.me/ [3]: http://taiga.pm/ http://taiga.pm/ [4]: https://kanboard.net/ https://kanboard.net/