An open source project needs active developers and maintainers in order to stay healthy and grow.

Parse is now open source in the sense of "here's a bunch of code we're throwing over the wall on our way out". Presumably (after the 1-year deadline) it's not going to be maintained or further developed by the original Parse team, who are now working for Facebook and will likely be reassigned to other roles.

Who is going to maintain the Parse source after that? A bunch of people that were using Parse specifically because they did not want to write their own backends to begin with?

Yes open source projects do, and Kinto is currently a well supported project at Mozilla. The folks who made Kinto are awesome, and do awesome things at Mozilla, but my personal experience from working at Mozilla is that Mozilla is an awesome steward of open source projects for users. The devtools team is doing a much better job of becoming stewards of tools for developers, but Mozilla has traditionally been less than ideal steward of projects for use by third parties.

The value of Parse is entirely in the client SDKs that would take forever to build and not in the server (which is a simple rest API over MongoDB).

It sounds like some of the more valuable aspects of the server (push notifications, dashboard, analytics) weren't open sourced. But the same caveats apply to the client side code.

This is not a feature complete replacement AFAIK. No push , no cloud code , no webhooks , no admin panel , no analytics though I'm sure people will contribute to the project and add some of these features.

EDIT: Hi folks, I was obviously talking about Parse, not Kinto. Kinto seems to have more features than Parse Server for now ! Looks like an awesome replacement.

You are correct that there is no push currently (we are exploring some ways to make it possible) and no admin panel (we are also exploring a lite admin panel), and no analytics (you should just use something like Mixpanel).

For cloud code, it's not true that parse-server doesn't support it - you can write cloud code directly in the node server.

For a full rundown on what's compatible, check out the migration guide: https://parse.com/docs/server/guide#migrating

The core functionality is there, and I highly recommend trying out the official Parse open source solution first, as it will be the easiest for most apps that want to migrate.

There is actually an admin console (http://kinto.github.io/kinto-admin/) and webhooks are currently in the pipe (https://github.com/Kinto/kinto-webpush)

There's an admin panel https://github.com/Kinto/kinto-admin Push: https://github.com/Kinto/kinto-webpush and https://github.com/leplatrem/cliquet-pusher

What do you mean by "cloud code"?

Anyway yeah, we're expecting help from the community to bring what's missing :)

I think the parent was talking about the open sourced parse code not being feature complete.

My understanding was that Parse (the company) has open-sourced an API-compatible re-implementation of their product as an act of kindness towards everyone currently using their system.

I may be way off base here, but there is no indication that this open source release from Parse is in any way a derivative of their commercial product... at this point whichever reimplementation of the Parse API gains the most developer mind share will survive as the winner. (Of course, Parse the company has a lot of inertia behind their own.)

It's API compatible, but even then not all API endpoints work. It's NOT their commercial product.

The quality of the code is a factor. Parsed wasn't originally intended to be open source.

You still have to host and manage it.

We have a one click deploy to heroku button http://kinto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/get-started.html#depl...

It's not entirely satisfying, but that just proves we could integrate with many hosting platforms.

I just created a PR to deploy Kinto on Google App Engine (Managed VMs).

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/python-docs-samples/p...

If there's interest I'll try to flesh it out more.