How would you tackle building a successful G Suite alternative?

Question

Hi HN,It seems to be a bigger interest in 'degoogling' lately. I'd like to ask the smart folks around here how would you tackle building a successful G Suite alternative as a sustainable business. What strategies / partnerships / business model would you pursue?For example, being such a big effort, I think open source is required in order to attract contributors, both hobbyists and companies (and maybe governments). It would also be the main differentiator.FYI I made a proposal for Mozilla (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-letter-mozilla-please-offer-g-suite-alternative-marius-andreiana/) which seemed a great fit, but they weren't interested.

austincheney · Accepted Answer

My approach that I am actively building right now is to rebuild the user facing half of the OS. This thing I am building is fully distributed, peer to peer, end to end encrypted, and if both end points are IPv6 point to point without a central server. The GUI is in the browser, limited to localhost, and secured by CSP. Changes to sharing between peers occur in real time without manual updates, queries, or refreshes.On top of that I have a security model that restricts availability between peers at the users discretion. First my goal is to master real time file system sharing in this security model. Then I will start working on sharing of application.

open-source-ux · Answer

What is needed is a solution to how the G Suite alternative (presumably open source) will be hosted. Lots of businesses (maybe the majority) won't want to self-install a piece of software that will generate hundreds, maybe thousands of documents (in addition to the need to manage backups and security).
The G Suite alternative needs to follow something like the WordPress model. In other words, businesses can shop around to find a suitable hosting plan for their G Suite alternative needs. Like WordPress, there will be cheap-and-cheerful hosting plans at one end of the scale and at the other end are managed services with SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and premium support.
The G Suite alternative will include an API that enables data to be transferred from one hosting provider to another allowing easy data transfer from one hosting provider to another.
The "WordPress" model is not a "pure" decentralised model but it's far more practical and more likely to have a chance to succeed.

tobyhede · Answer

Agree that Open Source is core. This might be something that could get crowd funding support.
A set of concrete principles, a modest plan* and roadmap and a slick vision captured in a video demo.
Modest in that start with 1 or 2 core features of G Suite like email and sheets rather than a claim "we can have it all".

ggm · Answer

API everything. Nothing should exist in the public view which is not exposed as an element in the API. So, JMAP and IMAP.
No uncrypted state on backing store. I know things flow in uncrypted but once at state of rest, encoded with my keys. You can offer escrow and key management but it has to be optional. If I throw my private key away and destroy recovery keys and have no escrow the data has to be gone.
Your logs can't be that easy to wipe because law enforcement will make demands on you.

PaulHoule · Answer

Don't take it all on at once, take a particular piece of it on.

Nextgrid · Answer

I would say first of all that it has to be self-hostable. Not necessarily free, but should be licensable for on-site use with no dependency on an external service.