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Show HN: LibreBoard – An open-source clone of Trello

243 points by mquandalle 12y ago

ericskiff 12y ago
While I love the idea of an open source tool that explores the same problems that Trello does and potentially even solves it in a very similar way, I have to admit that the exact look and feel being copied here seems like a blatant rip off. Am I off base? Can anyone speak to the copyright aspect of copying a solution and design so fully?
- deleted 12y ago
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- silverlight 12y ago
  It's one thing to have two ways of doing kanban boards, but there is definitely very much a "look and feel" copying going on here that I'm not sure is legal.
- r3bl 12y ago
  There is a discussion started in a GitHub issue about this. I must suggest you a comment by the project's co-owner: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomment-70800256 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomm... He went a little too far in his argument, but he does make a good point. EDIT: They've received a DMCA takedown notice from GitHub: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomment-71231561 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomm...
  - cheald 12y ago
    "In the meantime, please clone the repository on your local computer so we can have a lot of copies of it." Wow. That's uh. Something.
    - pb2au 12y ago
      Also in a previous comment by the author, before the DMCA: I also believe that it's not in Trello Inc. interest to try to censure us because of the Streisand effect, and it would be overly complex (I live in France, Yaşar lives in Turkey, we don't have a common company or an organization, and in fact we never met each other in the real life), and even if they stop us, and because the code is distributed under the MIT license some other will take the relay (remember PopCornTime anyone?). That, combined the author posting it to on HN several hours after getting the DMCA, makes it clear that the author does not care about blatantly ripping off and redistributing others' work. Regardless of whatever their proposed solution would be for correcting the infringement, I doubt this project will ever be safe to use under assumption of an open source license.
  - weego 12y ago
    I also believe that it's not in Trello Inc. interest to try to censure us because of the Streisand effect, and it would be overly complex What a thoroughly loathsome and naive attitude to have.
- danlec 12y ago
  See https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca451ae547b0803b8a07db4061cc4d7 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca4..., where they check a beautified version of Trello's CSS file into their MIT licensed project.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Great find. If that's as bad as it sounds, that could make an it an illegal derivative work, which would make for an easy DMCA claim.
    - krschultz 12y ago
      And now they were just DMCA'ed, rightfully so in my opinion. If you believe in open source, then you need to be respectful of copyright law. It is the foundation for open source licensing.
      - wpietri 12y ago
        Indeed. Here's them acknowledging that: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomment-71231561 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomm...
      - icebraining 12y ago
        If you believe in open source, then you need to be respectful of copyright law. It is the foundation for open source licensing. I don't see how that follows. I support open source, that is, the free distribution of software code. Open source licensing is just a necessary evil to account for the fact that copyright is anti-open-source by default. A few decades back, when the US and other countries required registration to copyright works, open source licensing would have been a ridiculous suggestion (except for copyleft licenses), even though open source itself would still make perfect sense.
        pb2au 12y ago
        It depends on your meaning behind "free distribution", but arguably most open source licenses don't exist to provide that specifically -- they exist to permit it while abiding by the other conditions on the license. For example, if you don't respect copyright law, you wouldn't be able to argue that a corporation taking GPLed code and incorporating it into a proprietary product is immoral nor taking BSD licensed code and removing a link back to the original author is immoral.
- wpietri 12y ago
  I'd love to hear from somebody who knows better, but my understanding is that the legal aspects of look-and-feel ripoffs have never been settled in court. In one sense, that doesn't matter. Trello has way more time and money, so I'm sure they can sue the LibreBoard people with enough vigor that the LibreBoard folks will decide it's much easier to come up with their own look. Whether or not LibreBoard could eventually win the suit is irrelevant if they can't afford to go the distance in court. Of course, it probably doesn't look great for Trello to sue a couple of random dudes, so I could see them letting it go. Or perhaps just calling them up and talking developer-to-developer about how this makes them feel as creators and asking LibreBoard to do their own work.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Actually they were litigated as part of the Lotus v. Borland suit which a distant cousin of mine (same name, common ancestor is like 4 generations back) was involved in, I sometimes get inquiries) [1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/lotus/lotus-borland-appeal-Mar95.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-p...
- ljk 12y ago
  Not an expert here, but isn't that how the task-managing board should look like? The first time I saw Trello I thought it looked very similar to the JIRA Agile boards by Atlassian....
- franciscop 12y ago
  I completely agree. I think they're looking for trouble, they crossed that line between "for fun" and "messing with a great website".
  - vladsanchez 12y ago
    I was yelling "Blasphemy!"
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  Even setting aside the legality of this rip, doesn't the ethical aspects of it bother anyone as well? Designing a simple and functional UI is really hard. It takes ages to sift through possible options, discard the fluff, iterate over the details and while the end result is endearingly simple, it ends up fronting a shitload of sweat and tears. And then someone just waltzes in waving their Libre flag and the middle finger to lift the whole thing just as if it's a no big deal. I don't know about you, but this really pisses me off. This is as disrespectful as it gets towards people who did the original work and it also reflects really poorly on the O/S in general.
  - streptomycin 12y ago
    That doesn't bother me. You could make a similar argument about some aspect of nearly every piece of open source software. Web design isn't special. What about C# vs Mono, Matlab vs Octave, Unix vs GNU/Linux, etc.? (Just to be clear... directly copying assets and code is not cool.)
  - mindcrime 12y ago
    "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". That said, yeah, I have a problem with stealing actual source code, even if it is "just" CSS and HTML or whatever. But as far as cribbing the "look and feel" stuff, I personally don't have a problem with it. And to the extent that I know anything about the legal aspects, I thought there was some old case involving Lotus or Adobe or somebody, that established that copying "look and feel" is legal? Edit: Here's more on the legal aspect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel#Lawsuits_over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel#Lawsuits_over
  - markdown 12y ago
    If you want to see a completely original UI with not a single thing "borrowed" from elsewhere, my 5yr old has some drawings to show you. This specific case takes it too far, there's no doubt about that. But you can be sure that the Trello designer was heavily influenced by those that came before him. UI designers spend half their time looking at UI's designed by others to see what works and what doesn't. In fact, more often than not, UI design should be copied. You don't design a completely different light switch just because you want to be original. Function before form.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  From what I can tell, they're working on a differentiated (improved, even) UI/L&F [0]. A lot of the concepts (including the one they seem to be working with) are based on mockups for improved versions of Trello's UI that were rejected by Trello, and it's apparent that non-Trello kanban software is being referenced as well. [0]: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94
codereflection 12y ago
Trello is free, so is this meant to complete with Trello Gold?
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
  There are reasons beyond money to use free (as in freedom) software.
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  It doesn't have to compete on just price. Trello is free (and I use it constantly), but using it still means having all of your data on remote servers. I can't use it at my job, for example, due to legitimate security concerns, but we could (in theory) use this new software instead.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  I can't use Trello at work because some of the data that would be placed there may have a restrictive information classification. I'd love to be able to buy a different tier of Trello service instead of stickers, but an open source clone will do too!
  - GETah 12y ago
    We've got an application that is very similar to trello (www.iferapp.com) that we are planning to offer in self hosted mode - we are going into beta very soon.
  - GETah 12y ago
    And here it is selfhosted.iferapp.com
pxlpshr 12y ago
I don't endorse a blatant rip off of the UI and the assets. You can do better than that. Otherwise, good job on the development effort and open source initiative.
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  It is a blatant imitation[1]. At the same time, the design is incredibly refined, so there's only so much room to move away from without making sacrifices solely for the sake of differentiation. EDIT: [1] According to a comment below, it's a straight-up copy of the CSS. That goes well beyond "blatant imitation."
  - tghw 12y ago
    Imitation is different than directly copying the CSS. They copied the CSS.
    - thirdtruck 12y ago
      Oh snap. That is a whole different story.
    - zo1 12y ago
      Which is totally fine for development purposes (prototype) and work in progress mockups. But they should have changed it before putting it on a public-facing .com domain.
      - cheald 12y ago
        I'm going to suggest that it's not even good for prototype work, because it invalidates any claim to clean-room implementation and makes it very easy to cross the line between original work and ripoff.
rcarmo 12y ago
Wow. Just wow. Two years ago we had an internal row about people using Trello and possibly exposing internal data (which we attempted to solve through various means). Having this as a Docker container is _great_ for in-house use (although I haven't checked the internals and am not very enthusiastic about their using Node...)
imslavko 12y ago
It is a great example of a bigger open-source Meteor apps in a wild along-side with Telescope (http://www.telesc.pe/ http://www.telesc.pe/) which is also well documented and is extensible.
austenallred 12y ago
I love the idea of open source tools, but this goes way too far. This isn't just rebuilding a popular concept, this is taking code that was written by a for-profit company and blatantly stealing it. There's an important difference. The earlier versions of this repo still used the Trello logo. Trello's CSS is blatantly used, even using trellicons, the custom icon font created by Trello. The entire front-end is completely, blatantly stolen. If you want to build LibreOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Word, that's great. But taking Microsoft Word's code and uploading it into an open source GitHub repository? That crosses the line. I don't care what legal ramifications there are or what constitutes copyright infringement or what is legally actionable (heaven knows the law is often off base from what is right/moral/ethical, especially in software). That's another discussion, but this is messed up. Can you create a task management system in Meteor.js that is inspired by "agile" methodology and similar to Trello? Sure. But blatantly taking code, especially without even putting a creative spin of your own on it, is just plain wrong.
- 300bps 12y ago
  Hmm. I've spent some time making my own Trello clone but mine has changed a little more than the one in the OP. First of all, mine is called Trellu. Check it out and let me know your thoughts: http://goo.gl/n8Ca0M http://goo.gl/n8Ca0M
  - Jugurtha 12y ago
    Hmmm, the intro video of the founder explaining Trellu is weird. He reminds me of a cropped Joel Spolsky. I don't know why.
- deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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  - weego 12y ago
    No it doesn't. Short reply but there is literally nothing else to say.
gitaarik 12y ago
I like it. I'm using Trello now, but the interface doesn't work that convenient on mobile I think. So I was thinking to make a client of my own using the Trello API, but this way I can change the original interface to my likings, and hopefully other's likings, so it gets merged :). EDIT: A lot of people seem to think it looks to much like Trello. While I agree that the interface looks strikingly similar (or maybe even just exactly the same), I think the intentions are not to evil. How can libre software have evil intentions? Of course it can, but since it's libre and everybody can read and change the sourcecode, it likely won't happen. And, in the end, isn't that why we have libre software at all? We want to have control over the software, instead of the software having control over us, right?
- tedunangst 12y ago
  If your "independent" clone is hot linking assets from the original, you probably have less control than you think. Ironically, Trello probably knows (or could learn) the IP of every person to use this.
  - thedufer 12y ago
    As far as I can tell, they're not actually hotlinking anything - they just copied it once into their repo. Did I miss something?
    - zevyoura 12y ago
      The copied css has references to image URLs in it.
      - thedufer 12y ago
        Oh, I see it now. I was searching for trello.com, but they're using images that come from cloudfront.
    - madeofpalk 12y ago
      Yes, you missed this commit. Where they copied across CSS from Trello, including image URLs. https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/blob/348081d9eca451ae547b0803b8a07db4061cc4d7/client/styles/aging.import.styl#L31 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/blob/348081d9eca451...
sergiotapia 12y ago
Fantastic! Gotta love the people who salivate at the mouth with talks of litigation. Just tweak the UI and this product is a great alternative. Congratulations on your launch
deleted 12y ago
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Globz 12y ago
Wow...this looks like a clone of Trello, sorry I cannot support this. I have been using Trello for a long time and I refuse to give credits to someone who blatantly stole the assets, code, etc. and didn't even care to AT LEAST add a different touch to the project. I love open source but this project is off the limit concerning copyrights.
- zo1 12y ago
  What code did they steal, exactly? They re-implemented all of the functionality, and I'm not sure they took take the JS either. So at this point, it leaves CSS + Look&Feel, and I think they took some icons, though that seems like more of an oversight as it's still a young project from the looks of it. I don't see this as any different to such works as OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and CorsixTH (Theme Hospital). Both open-source remakes of the popular closed-source games. Obviously they don't bundle the media (graphics, etc), and just ask end-installers to point to the installation files of the originals. You could argue that hot-linking css is quite similar to that, though not exactly. The real problem is them putting this not-yet-sanitized-of-all-copyright-infringment onto a public-facing site with a domain and everything. If it was still on Github, then that's fine. But they jumped the bandwagon a little too soon, and people are escalating it incredibly quickly.
  - cheald 12y ago
    The CSS is distributed in the Github repo, ostensibly under an open-source license, which the project maintainer has no right to use, distribute, or relicense. It's about as clear a case of copyright infringement as they come. (And that's not even mentioning that reusing someone else's CSS likely requires you to reuse their markup, too.)
  - Widdershin 12y ago
    https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca451ae547b0803b8a07db4061cc4d7 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca4...
  - bdcravens 12y ago
    Hot-linking has a very real and ongoing cost associated with it.
nautical 12y ago
Just the CSS for god sake ! ..... there is much more to it than that ...
- cheald 12y ago
  Well, it shouldn't be too hard for the author to write original 'Just CSS' then.
janus 12y ago
It's so sad that such great work can bring so many negative repercussions just because the project creator's decided to blatantly rip off Trello's assets. The project would be under such a different light had they decided style it themselves... I think they're so much better than this.
- nazgul 12y ago
  But are they? They did this, so unless you think they're completely naive (which in itself seems completely naive) you have to see fault here.
- kjs3 12y ago
  What "great work". He took someone else's work and said "look what I did".
  - lucio 12y ago
    They should rewrite the CSS from scratch. But for everything else is seems it is original work. And that's a big part of the project.
Jugurtha 12y ago
Reading all what is said, I can't keep myself from having words spring into my head: UNIX, GNU, Linux, Minix... I can use grep, cat, ls and so many commands on so many different machines... Same names, same functions, and the same UI (black screen, anyone?).
- tedunangst 12y ago
  Was GNU grep implemented by somebody writing the code or running "cp unix/grep.c gnu/grep.c"?
  - Jugurtha 12y ago
    To the best of my knowledge, the people behind this project wrote code. I don't know if it's a Bash script containing your one liner, though... But they seem to have their own code. (I don't think Trello's code is freely available). Bear in mind, I'm not for or against. I'm just putting the thing in perspective and to be compared with what happened throughout History. When I do Ctrl+K, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Tab in Firefox or Chrome, they all have the same side effects.
    - krschultz 12y ago
      The people in the project cp -rf'ed the assets from Trello proper including CSS, proprietary fonts, icons, and images.
      - Jugurtha 12y ago
        Indeed.
cstrahan 12y ago
Nice! I'm glad to see Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm seeing some love. For those not in the know: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ https://capnproto.org/ https://capnproto.org/ (I'm not affiliated in anyway, just a fan of Kenton Varda's work, which also include Protocol Buffers)
agmcleod 12y ago
Been kinda building a trello-like app myself. But it's far more simplistic in features, and i'm trying to build it so it's way more mobile friendly. I have the front end as open source, and the web back end as closed. Not sure why I am doing it this way, but I hope to put out a proprietary iOS app for it at some point. More or less started it to learn ReactJS. http://gitub.com/agmcleod/desert http://gitub.com/agmcleod/desert
- ay1n 12y ago
  There's typo in the URL, should be: https://github.com/agmcleod/desert https://github.com/agmcleod/desert
  - agmcleod 12y ago
    Ah thanks :)
nickysielicki 12y ago
I don't understand the ethical dilemma many of you are raising. I've never believed there's such a thing as plagiarism of style, only things like algorithms and methodologies. If someone makes a wierd looking chair, and I like it and make my own, and they try to tell me I'm stealing their ideas they can fuck off, especially if I'm not selling this chair but just using it for myself and helping others build their own chairs, too. Style sheets are within these same bounds as far as I care. They're not intellectual property or content. There's nothing profound about aesthetics. No hard work in refining it. It's something that's composed entirely of intuition and trying to copyright that seems immoral to me. CSS is dressing, not content, and dressing is the only thing they have stolen from trello.
- nhayden 12y ago
  The case for infringement would be very weak to non-existent if they recreated the look and feel writing the CSS themselves from scratch. The issue is they took the original product and modified some spacing and other minor details and redistributed it. Any written work like this is copyrightable.
  - nickysielicki 12y ago
    You're forgetting that they wrote the entire backend as a part of this.
    - bdcravens 12y ago
      Quickly reading through the code, it looks like the frontend is the bulk of the code. Which makes sense: Trello is really a pretty simple app; the UI experience is where the real magic is.
      - bbcbasic 12y ago
        Could even be done as a couchapp.
dewey 12y ago
"Yaşar received an email from Trello, Inc. asking him to rename the Metrello project. Do you have any idea for a new name?" [1] Apparently it was even called *trello a few weeks ago, so they are definitely aware of that project already. Curious why it wasn't DMCA'ed earlier already. [1] http://crater.io/posts/8azTCHojZq8CoJpAR http://crater.io/posts/8azTCHojZq8CoJpAR
- vohof 12y ago
  I had to check for dirt on my monitor on that one.
yellowapple 12y ago
I think if this had been actually clean-room reverse-engineered, it wouldn't be getting the backlash it's getting. The fact that the LibreBoard devs outright ripped off Trello's CSS and HTML is a bit disappointing. Perhaps with the DMCA notice they got, they'll consider scrapping the current UI and coming up with something a bit more, you know, not blatantly copy-pasted. That said, being able to use something reasonably-Trello-like for internal use (with data under the control of the entity using it) is a fantastic idea, and the fact that LibreBoard does that reasonably well (from what I can tell) gives me some hope that they'll manage to pull themselves out of this muck. EDIT: And apparently there is, in fact, an effort to actually create a UI that isn't a blatant Trello ripoff: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94
vdm 12y ago
So now we get to set WIP limits?
fiatjaf 12y ago
Well, apparently they reimplemented all the logic by their own, they just copied the visual from Trello, with a single CSS appropriation. They shouldn't have copied the CSS, but they can still "uncopy" it and write their own styles.
peeyek 12y ago
They received DMCA takedown notice from github because the user interface https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/14e6b2fb91496d4e35412a5106b559a271490291 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/14e6b2fb9149...
dogecoinbase 12y ago
For the curious, they're hosting their rework of the UI off github in order to comply with their DMCA takedown: http://git.libreboard.com/libreboard/libreboard/ http://git.libreboard.com/libreboard/libreboard/
fiatjaf 12y ago
Some time ago I made Youfle[1]. I was trying to make a Trello clone, but for structured data, like a direct interface to a document database that could be used (and/or extended) by not-so-simple but yet data management contexts. The idea was to make something versatile like a spreadsheet and yet powerful as a database. The design resembles Trello (and, differently from Libreboard, it has card drag-and-drop and horizontal scrolling with click-and-drag capabilities). It works offline and saves data to PouchDB (IndexedDB on your browser, probably). Documents should be written in YAML, but they also accept free text. The custom indexing, map and reduce functions, pagination, querying and other UI features were not implemented yet. To edit a card, double-click on its title. Adding the ID of other card as a value to any property of a card you create a link between the two, which you can see if you click on the body of the card after you stop editing. If anyone has feedback to share about this, please let me know. The code is at GitHub[2]. [1]: http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/youfle/ http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/youfle/ [2]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/youfle https://github.com/fiatjaf/youfle

243 points by mquandalle 12y ago

While I love the idea of an open source tool that explores the same problems that Trello does and potentially even solves it in a very similar way, I have to admit that the exact look and feel being copied here seems like a blatant rip off. Am I off base? Can anyone speak to the copyright aspect of copying a solution and design so fully?

deleted 12y ago
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silverlight 12y ago
It's one thing to have two ways of doing kanban boards, but there is definitely very much a "look and feel" copying going on here that I'm not sure is legal.
r3bl 12y ago
There is a discussion started in a GitHub issue about this. I must suggest you a comment by the project's co-owner: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomment-70800256 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomm... He went a little too far in his argument, but he does make a good point. EDIT: They've received a DMCA takedown notice from GitHub: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomment-71231561 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomm...
- cheald 12y ago
  "In the meantime, please clone the repository on your local computer so we can have a lot of copies of it." Wow. That's uh. Something.
  - pb2au 12y ago
    Also in a previous comment by the author, before the DMCA: I also believe that it's not in Trello Inc. interest to try to censure us because of the Streisand effect, and it would be overly complex (I live in France, Yaşar lives in Turkey, we don't have a common company or an organization, and in fact we never met each other in the real life), and even if they stop us, and because the code is distributed under the MIT license some other will take the relay (remember PopCornTime anyone?). That, combined the author posting it to on HN several hours after getting the DMCA, makes it clear that the author does not care about blatantly ripping off and redistributing others' work. Regardless of whatever their proposed solution would be for correcting the infringement, I doubt this project will ever be safe to use under assumption of an open source license.
- weego 12y ago
  I also believe that it's not in Trello Inc. interest to try to censure us because of the Streisand effect, and it would be overly complex What a thoroughly loathsome and naive attitude to have.
danlec 12y ago
See https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca451ae547b0803b8a07db4061cc4d7 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca4..., where they check a beautified version of Trello's CSS file into their MIT licensed project.
- wpietri 12y ago
  Great find. If that's as bad as it sounds, that could make an it an illegal derivative work, which would make for an easy DMCA claim.
  - krschultz 12y ago
    And now they were just DMCA'ed, rightfully so in my opinion. If you believe in open source, then you need to be respectful of copyright law. It is the foundation for open source licensing.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      Indeed. Here's them acknowledging that: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomment-71231561 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/92#issuecomm...
    - icebraining 12y ago
      If you believe in open source, then you need to be respectful of copyright law. It is the foundation for open source licensing. I don't see how that follows. I support open source, that is, the free distribution of software code. Open source licensing is just a necessary evil to account for the fact that copyright is anti-open-source by default. A few decades back, when the US and other countries required registration to copyright works, open source licensing would have been a ridiculous suggestion (except for copyleft licenses), even though open source itself would still make perfect sense.
      - pb2au 12y ago
        It depends on your meaning behind "free distribution", but arguably most open source licenses don't exist to provide that specifically -- they exist to permit it while abiding by the other conditions on the license. For example, if you don't respect copyright law, you wouldn't be able to argue that a corporation taking GPLed code and incorporating it into a proprietary product is immoral nor taking BSD licensed code and removing a link back to the original author is immoral.
wpietri 12y ago
I'd love to hear from somebody who knows better, but my understanding is that the legal aspects of look-and-feel ripoffs have never been settled in court. In one sense, that doesn't matter. Trello has way more time and money, so I'm sure they can sue the LibreBoard people with enough vigor that the LibreBoard folks will decide it's much easier to come up with their own look. Whether or not LibreBoard could eventually win the suit is irrelevant if they can't afford to go the distance in court. Of course, it probably doesn't look great for Trello to sue a couple of random dudes, so I could see them letting it go. Or perhaps just calling them up and talking developer-to-developer about how this makes them feel as creators and asking LibreBoard to do their own work.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Actually they were litigated as part of the Lotus v. Borland suit which a distant cousin of mine (same name, common ancestor is like 4 generations back) was involved in, I sometimes get inquiries) [1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/lotus/lotus-borland-appeal-Mar95.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-p...
ljk 12y ago
Not an expert here, but isn't that how the task-managing board should look like? The first time I saw Trello I thought it looked very similar to the JIRA Agile boards by Atlassian....
franciscop 12y ago
I completely agree. I think they're looking for trouble, they crossed that line between "for fun" and "messing with a great website".
- vladsanchez 12y ago
  I was yelling "Blasphemy!"
huhtenberg 12y ago
Even setting aside the legality of this rip, doesn't the ethical aspects of it bother anyone as well? Designing a simple and functional UI is really hard. It takes ages to sift through possible options, discard the fluff, iterate over the details and while the end result is endearingly simple, it ends up fronting a shitload of sweat and tears. And then someone just waltzes in waving their Libre flag and the middle finger to lift the whole thing just as if it's a no big deal. I don't know about you, but this really pisses me off. This is as disrespectful as it gets towards people who did the original work and it also reflects really poorly on the O/S in general.
- streptomycin 12y ago
  That doesn't bother me. You could make a similar argument about some aspect of nearly every piece of open source software. Web design isn't special. What about C# vs Mono, Matlab vs Octave, Unix vs GNU/Linux, etc.? (Just to be clear... directly copying assets and code is not cool.)
- mindcrime 12y ago
  "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". That said, yeah, I have a problem with stealing actual source code, even if it is "just" CSS and HTML or whatever. But as far as cribbing the "look and feel" stuff, I personally don't have a problem with it. And to the extent that I know anything about the legal aspects, I thought there was some old case involving Lotus or Adobe or somebody, that established that copying "look and feel" is legal? Edit: Here's more on the legal aspect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel#Lawsuits_over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel#Lawsuits_over
- markdown 12y ago
  If you want to see a completely original UI with not a single thing "borrowed" from elsewhere, my 5yr old has some drawings to show you. This specific case takes it too far, there's no doubt about that. But you can be sure that the Trello designer was heavily influenced by those that came before him. UI designers spend half their time looking at UI's designed by others to see what works and what doesn't. In fact, more often than not, UI design should be copied. You don't design a completely different light switch just because you want to be original. Function before form.
yellowapple 12y ago
From what I can tell, they're working on a differentiated (improved, even) UI/L&F [0]. A lot of the concepts (including the one they seem to be working with) are based on mockups for improved versions of Trello's UI that were rejected by Trello, and it's apparent that non-Trello kanban software is being referenced as well. [0]: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94

codereflection 12y ago

Trello is free, so is this meant to complete with Trello Gold?

Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
There are reasons beyond money to use free (as in freedom) software.
thirdtruck 12y ago
It doesn't have to compete on just price. Trello is free (and I use it constantly), but using it still means having all of your data on remote servers. I can't use it at my job, for example, due to legitimate security concerns, but we could (in theory) use this new software instead.
Spooky23 12y ago
I can't use Trello at work because some of the data that would be placed there may have a restrictive information classification. I'd love to be able to buy a different tier of Trello service instead of stickers, but an open source clone will do too!
- GETah 12y ago
  We've got an application that is very similar to trello (www.iferapp.com) that we are planning to offer in self hosted mode - we are going into beta very soon.
- GETah 12y ago
  And here it is selfhosted.iferapp.com

pxlpshr 12y ago

I don't endorse a blatant rip off of the UI and the assets. You can do better than that. Otherwise, good job on the development effort and open source initiative.

thirdtruck 12y ago
It is a blatant imitation[1]. At the same time, the design is incredibly refined, so there's only so much room to move away from without making sacrifices solely for the sake of differentiation. EDIT: [1] According to a comment below, it's a straight-up copy of the CSS. That goes well beyond "blatant imitation."
- tghw 12y ago
  Imitation is different than directly copying the CSS. They copied the CSS.
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    Oh snap. That is a whole different story.
  - zo1 12y ago
    Which is totally fine for development purposes (prototype) and work in progress mockups. But they should have changed it before putting it on a public-facing .com domain.
    - cheald 12y ago
      I'm going to suggest that it's not even good for prototype work, because it invalidates any claim to clean-room implementation and makes it very easy to cross the line between original work and ripoff.

rcarmo 12y ago

Wow. Just wow. Two years ago we had an internal row about people using Trello and possibly exposing internal data (which we attempted to solve through various means). Having this as a Docker container is _great_ for in-house use (although I haven't checked the internals and am not very enthusiastic about their using Node...)

imslavko 12y ago

It is a great example of a bigger open-source Meteor apps in a wild along-side with Telescope (http://www.telesc.pe/ http://www.telesc.pe/) which is also well documented and is extensible.

austenallred 12y ago

I love the idea of open source tools, but this goes way too far. This isn't just rebuilding a popular concept, this is taking code that was written by a for-profit company and blatantly stealing it. There's an important difference. The earlier versions of this repo still used the Trello logo. Trello's CSS is blatantly used, even using trellicons, the custom icon font created by Trello. The entire front-end is completely, blatantly stolen. If you want to build LibreOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Word, that's great. But taking Microsoft Word's code and uploading it into an open source GitHub repository? That crosses the line. I don't care what legal ramifications there are or what constitutes copyright infringement or what is legally actionable (heaven knows the law is often off base from what is right/moral/ethical, especially in software). That's another discussion, but this is messed up. Can you create a task management system in Meteor.js that is inspired by "agile" methodology and similar to Trello? Sure. But blatantly taking code, especially without even putting a creative spin of your own on it, is just plain wrong.

300bps 12y ago
Hmm. I've spent some time making my own Trello clone but mine has changed a little more than the one in the OP. First of all, mine is called Trellu. Check it out and let me know your thoughts: http://goo.gl/n8Ca0M http://goo.gl/n8Ca0M
- Jugurtha 12y ago
  Hmmm, the intro video of the founder explaining Trellu is weird. He reminds me of a cropped Joel Spolsky. I don't know why.
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- weego 12y ago
  No it doesn't. Short reply but there is literally nothing else to say.

gitaarik 12y ago

I like it. I'm using Trello now, but the interface doesn't work that convenient on mobile I think. So I was thinking to make a client of my own using the Trello API, but this way I can change the original interface to my likings, and hopefully other's likings, so it gets merged :). EDIT: A lot of people seem to think it looks to much like Trello. While I agree that the interface looks strikingly similar (or maybe even just exactly the same), I think the intentions are not to evil. How can libre software have evil intentions? Of course it can, but since it's libre and everybody can read and change the sourcecode, it likely won't happen. And, in the end, isn't that why we have libre software at all? We want to have control over the software, instead of the software having control over us, right?

tedunangst 12y ago
If your "independent" clone is hot linking assets from the original, you probably have less control than you think. Ironically, Trello probably knows (or could learn) the IP of every person to use this.
- thedufer 12y ago
  As far as I can tell, they're not actually hotlinking anything - they just copied it once into their repo. Did I miss something?
  - zevyoura 12y ago
    The copied css has references to image URLs in it.
    - thedufer 12y ago
      Oh, I see it now. I was searching for trello.com, but they're using images that come from cloudfront.
  - madeofpalk 12y ago
    Yes, you missed this commit. Where they copied across CSS from Trello, including image URLs. https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/blob/348081d9eca451ae547b0803b8a07db4061cc4d7/client/styles/aging.import.styl#L31 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/blob/348081d9eca451...

sergiotapia 12y ago

Fantastic! Gotta love the people who salivate at the mouth with talks of litigation. Just tweak the UI and this product is a great alternative. Congratulations on your launch

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Globz 12y ago

Wow...this looks like a clone of Trello, sorry I cannot support this. I have been using Trello for a long time and I refuse to give credits to someone who blatantly stole the assets, code, etc. and didn't even care to AT LEAST add a different touch to the project. I love open source but this project is off the limit concerning copyrights.

zo1 12y ago
What code did they steal, exactly? They re-implemented all of the functionality, and I'm not sure they took take the JS either. So at this point, it leaves CSS + Look&Feel, and I think they took some icons, though that seems like more of an oversight as it's still a young project from the looks of it. I don't see this as any different to such works as OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and CorsixTH (Theme Hospital). Both open-source remakes of the popular closed-source games. Obviously they don't bundle the media (graphics, etc), and just ask end-installers to point to the installation files of the originals. You could argue that hot-linking css is quite similar to that, though not exactly. The real problem is them putting this not-yet-sanitized-of-all-copyright-infringment onto a public-facing site with a domain and everything. If it was still on Github, then that's fine. But they jumped the bandwagon a little too soon, and people are escalating it incredibly quickly.
- cheald 12y ago
  The CSS is distributed in the Github repo, ostensibly under an open-source license, which the project maintainer has no right to use, distribute, or relicense. It's about as clear a case of copyright infringement as they come. (And that's not even mentioning that reusing someone else's CSS likely requires you to reuse their markup, too.)
- Widdershin 12y ago
  https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca451ae547b0803b8a07db4061cc4d7 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/348081d9eca4...
- bdcravens 12y ago
  Hot-linking has a very real and ongoing cost associated with it.

nautical 12y ago

Just the CSS for god sake ! ..... there is much more to it than that ...

cheald 12y ago
Well, it shouldn't be too hard for the author to write original 'Just CSS' then.

janus 12y ago

It's so sad that such great work can bring so many negative repercussions just because the project creator's decided to blatantly rip off Trello's assets. The project would be under such a different light had they decided style it themselves... I think they're so much better than this.

nazgul 12y ago
But are they? They did this, so unless you think they're completely naive (which in itself seems completely naive) you have to see fault here.
kjs3 12y ago
What "great work". He took someone else's work and said "look what I did".
- lucio 12y ago
  They should rewrite the CSS from scratch. But for everything else is seems it is original work. And that's a big part of the project.

Jugurtha 12y ago

Reading all what is said, I can't keep myself from having words spring into my head: UNIX, GNU, Linux, Minix... I can use grep, cat, ls and so many commands on so many different machines... Same names, same functions, and the same UI (black screen, anyone?).

tedunangst 12y ago
Was GNU grep implemented by somebody writing the code or running "cp unix/grep.c gnu/grep.c"?
- Jugurtha 12y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, the people behind this project wrote code. I don't know if it's a Bash script containing your one liner, though... But they seem to have their own code. (I don't think Trello's code is freely available). Bear in mind, I'm not for or against. I'm just putting the thing in perspective and to be compared with what happened throughout History. When I do Ctrl+K, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Tab in Firefox or Chrome, they all have the same side effects.
  - krschultz 12y ago
    The people in the project cp -rf'ed the assets from Trello proper including CSS, proprietary fonts, icons, and images.
    - Jugurtha 12y ago
      Indeed.

cstrahan 12y ago

Nice! I'm glad to see Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm seeing some love. For those not in the know: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ https://capnproto.org/ https://capnproto.org/ (I'm not affiliated in anyway, just a fan of Kenton Varda's work, which also include Protocol Buffers)

agmcleod 12y ago

Been kinda building a trello-like app myself. But it's far more simplistic in features, and i'm trying to build it so it's way more mobile friendly. I have the front end as open source, and the web back end as closed. Not sure why I am doing it this way, but I hope to put out a proprietary iOS app for it at some point. More or less started it to learn ReactJS. http://gitub.com/agmcleod/desert http://gitub.com/agmcleod/desert

ay1n 12y ago
There's typo in the URL, should be: https://github.com/agmcleod/desert https://github.com/agmcleod/desert
- agmcleod 12y ago
  Ah thanks :)

nickysielicki 12y ago

I don't understand the ethical dilemma many of you are raising. I've never believed there's such a thing as plagiarism of style, only things like algorithms and methodologies. If someone makes a wierd looking chair, and I like it and make my own, and they try to tell me I'm stealing their ideas they can fuck off, especially if I'm not selling this chair but just using it for myself and helping others build their own chairs, too. Style sheets are within these same bounds as far as I care. They're not intellectual property or content. There's nothing profound about aesthetics. No hard work in refining it. It's something that's composed entirely of intuition and trying to copyright that seems immoral to me. CSS is dressing, not content, and dressing is the only thing they have stolen from trello.

nhayden 12y ago
The case for infringement would be very weak to non-existent if they recreated the look and feel writing the CSS themselves from scratch. The issue is they took the original product and modified some spacing and other minor details and redistributed it. Any written work like this is copyrightable.
- nickysielicki 12y ago
  You're forgetting that they wrote the entire backend as a part of this.
  - bdcravens 12y ago
    Quickly reading through the code, it looks like the frontend is the bulk of the code. Which makes sense: Trello is really a pretty simple app; the UI experience is where the real magic is.
    - bbcbasic 12y ago
      Could even be done as a couchapp.

dewey 12y ago

"Yaşar received an email from Trello, Inc. asking him to rename the Metrello project. Do you have any idea for a new name?" [1] Apparently it was even called *trello a few weeks ago, so they are definitely aware of that project already. Curious why it wasn't DMCA'ed earlier already. [1] http://crater.io/posts/8azTCHojZq8CoJpAR http://crater.io/posts/8azTCHojZq8CoJpAR

vohof 12y ago
I had to check for dirt on my monitor on that one.

yellowapple 12y ago

I think if this had been actually clean-room reverse-engineered, it wouldn't be getting the backlash it's getting. The fact that the LibreBoard devs outright ripped off Trello's CSS and HTML is a bit disappointing. Perhaps with the DMCA notice they got, they'll consider scrapping the current UI and coming up with something a bit more, you know, not blatantly copy-pasted. That said, being able to use something reasonably-Trello-like for internal use (with data under the control of the entity using it) is a fantastic idea, and the fact that LibreBoard does that reasonably well (from what I can tell) gives me some hope that they'll manage to pull themselves out of this muck. EDIT: And apparently there is, in fact, an effort to actually create a UI that isn't a blatant Trello ripoff: https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94

vdm 12y ago

So now we get to set WIP limits?

fiatjaf 12y ago

Well, apparently they reimplemented all the logic by their own, they just copied the visual from Trello, with a single CSS appropriation. They shouldn't have copied the CSS, but they can still "uncopy" it and write their own styles.

peeyek 12y ago

They received DMCA takedown notice from github because the user interface https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/14e6b2fb91496d4e35412a5106b559a271490291 https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/14e6b2fb9149...

dogecoinbase 12y ago

For the curious, they're hosting their rework of the UI off github in order to comply with their DMCA takedown: http://git.libreboard.com/libreboard/libreboard/ http://git.libreboard.com/libreboard/libreboard/

fiatjaf 12y ago

Some time ago I made Youfle[1]. I was trying to make a Trello clone, but for structured data, like a direct interface to a document database that could be used (and/or extended) by not-so-simple but yet data management contexts. The idea was to make something versatile like a spreadsheet and yet powerful as a database. The design resembles Trello (and, differently from Libreboard, it has card drag-and-drop and horizontal scrolling with click-and-drag capabilities). It works offline and saves data to PouchDB (IndexedDB on your browser, probably). Documents should be written in YAML, but they also accept free text. The custom indexing, map and reduce functions, pagination, querying and other UI features were not implemented yet. To edit a card, double-click on its title. Adding the ID of other card as a value to any property of a card you create a link between the two, which you can see if you click on the body of the card after you stop editing. If anyone has feedback to share about this, please let me know. The code is at GitHub[2]. [1]: http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/youfle/ http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/youfle/ [2]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/youfle https://github.com/fiatjaf/youfle