@kshitij Did you get a chance to look into it? If you could post the link to the ticket here others might also use it to follow what is happening :)
@antoviaque I’ve only looked into some of the options and tried setting them up so far. I had too many leaves at odd times in October to do proper justice. I’ll try to post here soon with some of the options I hadn’t considered before.
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One of the projects I am investigating again is Tuleap. I incorrectly thought that this was open core since it has a community and enterprise version, however it seems they are both open source and AGPL will all enterprise plugins being open source as well.
I’m still investigating this, but it seems like a strong contender. This sprint I’m looking into installing the community version and enterprise version. They have both hosted and a supported on-prem version.
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Tuleap is PHP but quite promising so far. I am trying to figure out how to get the enterprise features from source since that should technically be possible.
I’m also looking into HelixTrac Core which also looks quite promising and seems to be tracking feature parity with JIRA
@samuel volunteered to help with this so I think we can split work between us.
Would you be interested in investigating Odoo (Python based, but open-core so we’d need to implement the missing features ourselves) and/or Helix (Go-based, open source and should be feature-complete)?
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Can we skip on open core projects? I know they are tempting, but they really end up being like shareware at the end, ie more following the logic of proprietary software than open source, and we are certain to get resistance from upstream when redeveloping features they charge for.
@kshitij sure I’ll take a look. 
Do you have a list of requirements from previous discoveries for what we need in a Jira-replacement? There are things on the admin, billing, and automation side that I’m not sure what we’d need exactly.
I’ll start with this one, considering @antoviaque’s comment about avoiding open-core. Could you link me to it please? I’ve found some software named Helix, but nothing that looks like a Jira-replacement - an SDK for HelixDB, a service framework, a text editor… 
EDIT: or did you mean HelixTrack Core?
+1.
I recently ran into plane.so promoting theirs on a FOSS telegram group. They seemed to engage 121 on messages, so I asked about community building a plugin that copies their enterprise feature (time-tracking in this case) and got no response. Not even to say, we won’t support such plugins.
I did initially, but given that the first round ended up with no candidates, I thought we were now open to forking an existing project that’s close to our needs. (Based on this discussion chain). If there is an open core project that has most of what we need in the core, but we can fork it or otherwise implement the missing features via open plugins that would be worth a look.
@kshitij True, a fork could indeed solve the problem of being open core… But then we would have another issue (the huge maintenance burden) which we need to be able to share with a community - alone would still be tricky to shoulder the development and maintenance of the whole tool ourselves.
For Huly given their sudden change of direction, we could maybe find other disgruntled community members to do the fork with us. If we fork an open core project, the community using it in the first place doesn’t care (or doesn’t know to care) about the issues with open core, so we are unlikely to win people over to our less-resourced fork. Especially with the main project having closed-source features to attract users.
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Recently I’ve been looking into two options, Tuleap and Odoo and I think I’ve reached a point where it would be nice to get some input before proceeding.
Tuleap is a PHP-based tool that appears to use an open-core model with a community version and an enterprise version. What I’ve gathered so far is that the enterprise version is essentially like the core version (open source) with additional open-source modules and official support. While it should technically be possible to self-host the “enterprise” version, I haven’t had much success with it so far. Partially this is due to technical problems on my end, but there is more friction than I’d like.
The community version has a Docker image; the enterprise version also has a Docker image; however, to access the enterprise image, you need to pay. It seems to be similar to the model of paying for the convenience of getting binaries. It’s all a bit unclear, and since their product also includes Git hosting, their main code is hosted on their own platform instead of GitHub. You can run it from source, which is what I did. I can dig deeper into getting the enterprise modules running.
Odoo is a Python-based open-core solution. While generally open core is not what we’re looking for, Odoo has a special setup that I feel makes it worth considering. First of all, there is the Odoo Community Association that built around supporting open-source Odoo ecosystem and ensuring its survival independent of the commercial company. The community has its own app store with open-source apps in addition to the official app store that also has hundreds, potentially thousands of apps/plugins. Some of these plugins replicate enterprise features. In this case we can focus entirely on the open source product and treat the enterprise product as someone selling a bundle of commercial plugins.
Odoo is an ERP, but has a module for projects that supports features we want. It can potentially replace other tools we use since it can generate invoices, handle sales quotations, track leads, has a discussion tool, a calendar, an appointment scheduling tool (like calendly) etc.
I’m favoring Odoo over Tuleap since it’s Python-based, already quite modular, easy to install and extend, and has a nice community and a funded community organization. It’s also much older, around 20 years! I’d love to get some input from everyone before spending additional time in either direction or in looking into further alternatives.
I don’t think forking Huly will be very proproductive, since it’s still comparatively new, without as much community around it and I don’t really see much objection to its recent changes other than one small ticket to maintain compatibility with Postgres.
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@kshitij Based on what you’re telling me here, Odoo also sounds like the better option. I’d be very interested to give it a spin!
The existence of a separate community governing org and plugin repo with directly competing open source plugins feels like it addresses the normal concerns I would have with open core.
@kshitij But… Didn’t we just discuss how we should not select an open core project? I know our options are dwindling, but I’d rather start with something less good but fully open source, rather than nicer but half proprietary. At least the first one we have a way to get to something good that fits us well one day.
@antoviaque That is why I did not explore further before posting.
That said, this one seemed like a special case since it’s already in the state that you mentioned you’d want Huly to be in, i.e. a fork that’s maintained by the community that’s fully open source and has a community around it. With Huly we’d need to build that, but with Odoo it’s already there.
It really depends on the perspective you take. If you consider the community to be the true guardian of the code, then it’s a fully open-source product, but there is a company that sells a bundle with proprietary extensions. This is similar to Redmine, which has open-core editions like EasyRedmine and OpenProject.
If you consider the company the guardian of the code, then you have an open core product but with a community around building open-source extensions.
In any case, I posted about it because it seemed worth a deeper look due to its unique setup, but I knew the open-core nature would be a point of concern.
I’ll update the discovery with the projects I’ve investigated and update here again. If the current candidates (Taiga, Odoo, and Tuleap) don’t fit our needs then we can continue in the next phase which @samuel has agreed to take on.
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Probably not an actual replacement, but I thought I’d share 37signals just released this tool called Fizzy, and it’s 100% open source: https://www.fizzy.do/
They do mention it as a replacement to Jira, but I think it’s much simpler. I haven’t tried it though.
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It looks pretty nice, but it’s closer to Trello in terms of features - which we used to use, but we eventually outgrew. It’s also not quite 100% open source as it has a custom license which forbids you from competing with their hosted service.
@kshitij Ah, good to know, and that is a good point. Sounds good to explore it further then 
In particular, I would be interested in looking at examples of features that are proprietary in the main open core project, but where the community has attempted to develop & release the same feature.
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A year later of searching, it isn’t worth checking Elemo again (or an in-house tool for this)?
This kind of software is so central on our workflow that I think is worth to spend some hours to fit the tool to our culture. We could incorporate Sprintcraft, a more systemic flow for the Epic Updates and the Sustainability Reviews (which could save some hours from our team on the long term), checklists from Listaflow (integrated with the context), and a lot of things that are coming up from the process revamp.
The main issue will be how can we fund it.
Falcon hit the sustainability rate for 2024 (13% vs 26%), and we would likely keep the rate low (~10%) for 2025. If we manage to have the sustainability to “spare”, a project like this would help to remedy the current gap of work situation for a time.
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I’ve updated the original discovery document with more findings.
Please have a look and commend and I will use the feedback to guide further investigation into these three options.
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I’d love to get more opinions on this! Please take some time out to comment on the doc.
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Just from a BizDev perspective, Odoo probably looks like the best option due to their CRM features and integrations. If we’re able to combine the features we want out of a CRM with the Jira replacement, it would save resources and be much easier for me and for the team to have everything in one place moving forward.
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