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

I love the idea of open source tools, but this goes way too far. This isn&#x27;t just rebuilding a popular concept, this is <i>taking code</i> that was written by a for-profit company and blatantly stealing it. There&#x27;s an important difference.<p>The earlier versions of this repo <i>still used the Trello logo.</i> Trello&#x27;s CSS is blatantly used, even using trellicons, the custom icon font created by Trello. The entire front-end is completely, blatantly stolen.<p>If you want to build LibreOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Word, that&#x27;s great. But taking Microsoft Word&#x27;s code and uploading it into an open source GitHub repository? That crosses the line. I don&#x27;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&#x2F;moral&#x2F;ethical, especially in software). That&#x27;s another discussion, but this is messed up.<p>Can you create a task management system in Meteor.js that is inspired by &quot;agile&quot; 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.

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?

Wow...this looks like a clone of Trello, sorry I cannot support this.<p>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&#x27;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.

&quot;Yaşar received an email from Trello, Inc. asking him to rename the Metrello project. Do you have any idea for a new name?&quot; [1]<p>Apparently it was even called *trello a few weeks ago, so they are definitely aware of that project already. Curious why it wasn&#x27;t DMCA&#x27;ed earlier already.<p>[1] <a href="http://crater.io/posts/8azTCHojZq8CoJpAR" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;crater.io&#x2F;posts&#x2F;8azTCHojZq8CoJpAR</a>

I don&#x27;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.

I think if this had been actually clean-room reverse-engineered, it wouldn&#x27;t be getting the backlash it&#x27;s getting.<p>The fact that the LibreBoard devs outright ripped off Trello&#x27;s CSS and HTML is a bit disappointing. Perhaps with the DMCA notice they got, they&#x27;ll consider scrapping the current UI and coming up with something a bit more, you know, not blatantly copy-pasted.<p>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&#x27;ll manage to pull themselves out of this muck.<p>EDIT: And apparently there is, in fact, an effort to actually create a UI that isn&#x27;t a blatant Trello ripoff: <a href="https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/issues/94" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libreboard&#x2F;libreboard&#x2F;issues&#x2F;94</a>

Nice! I&#x27;m glad to see Cap&#x27;n Proto and Sandstorm seeing some love.<p>For those not in the know:<p><a href="https://sandstorm.io/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io&#x2F;</a> <a href="https://capnproto.org/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;capnproto.org&#x2F;</a><p>(I&#x27;m not affiliated in anyway, just a fan of Kenton Varda&#x27;s work, which also include Protocol Buffers)

It&#x27;s so sad that such great work can bring so many negative repercussions just because the project creator&#x27;s decided to blatantly rip off Trello&#x27;s assets.<p>The project would be under such a different light had they decided style it themselves... I think they&#x27;re so much better than this.

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&#x2F;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).<p>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.<p>If anyone has feedback to share about this, please let me know. The code is at GitHub[2].<p>[1]: <a href="http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/youfle/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fiatjaf.alhur.es&#x2F;youfle&#x2F;</a> [2]: <a href="https://github.com/fiatjaf/youfle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fiatjaf&#x2F;youfle</a>

I like it. I&#x27;m using Trello now, but the interface doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s likings, so it gets merged :).<p>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&#x27;s libre and everybody can read and change the sourcecode, it likely won&#x27;t happen.<p>And, in the end, isn&#x27;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?

It is a great example of a bigger open-source Meteor apps in a wild along-side with Telescope (<a href="http://www.telesc.pe/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telesc.pe&#x2F;</a>) which is also well documented and is extensible.

For the curious, they&#x27;re hosting their rework of the UI off github in order to comply with their DMCA takedown: <a href="http://git.libreboard.com/libreboard/libreboard/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.libreboard.com&#x2F;libreboard&#x2F;libreboard&#x2F;</a>

Been kinda building a trello-like app myself. But it&#x27;s far more simplistic in features, and i&#x27;m trying to build it so it&#x27;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.<p>More or less started it to learn ReactJS. <a href="http://gitub.com/agmcleod/desert" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitub.com&#x2F;agmcleod&#x2F;desert</a>

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).<p>Having this as a Docker container is _great_ for in-house use (although I haven&#x27;t checked the internals and am not very enthusiastic about their using Node...)

They received DMCA takedown notice from github because the user interface <a href="https://github.com/libreboard/libreboard/commit/14e6b2fb91496d4e35412a5106b559a271490291" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libreboard&#x2F;libreboard&#x2F;commit&#x2F;14e6b2fb9149...</a>

Well, apparently they reimplemented all the logic by their own, they just copied the visual from Trello, with a single CSS appropriation. They shouldn&#x27;t have copied the CSS, but they can still &quot;uncopy&quot; it and write their own styles.

So now we get to set WIP limits?

Reading all what is said, I can&#x27;t keep myself from having words spring into my head: UNIX, GNU, Linux, Minix...<p>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?).

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

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

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

I don&#x27;t understand the ethical dilemma many of you are raising.<p>I&#x27;ve never believed there&#x27;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&#x27;m stealing their ideas they can fuck off, especially if I&#x27;m not selling this chair but just using it for myself and helping others build their own chairs, too.<p>Style sheets are within these same bounds as far as I care. They&#x27;re not intellectual property or content. There&#x27;s nothing profound about aesthetics. No hard work in refining it. It&#x27;s something that&#x27;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.