From what I understand, Atlassian is pushing hard to move everyone to their cloud offerings. I think the only way to run on-prem stuff now is to use the Enterprise or Data Center offerings, which are stupid expensive.

And here, “stupid expensive” means $42K/yr: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=data-cen...

Yeah, no.

7$/user/month is pretty reasonable IMHO. Of course only for companies with 500 users. But even if you buy the 500 seat package for 100 users it's just 35$/user/month, compared to normal engineering salaries this is absolutely negligible.

It's not reasonable to post your company trade secrets on a third party, internet-accessible server.

How has no one open-sourced a competing product by now? It feels like the universe where Git was never invented and everyone stayed subscribed to Perforce.

Are executives just scared of getting fired for moving off of Azure DevOps and Jira? They’re both garbage pieces of software and everyone who uses them knows it.

I think the reason nobody open sources a competitor is because most people in a position to develop such a thing don’t think the solution to the overarching problems the Atlassian tools supposedly solve is a similar suite of tools.

I’ve learned to translate “We need to buy into Atlassian’s suite” as “our process is broken and we’re blaming the tools.” This has the standard “now you have two problems” punchline. I’ve seen this play out several times at companies of varying sizes. The endgame “fix” is always that one or more people become entirely devoted to wrangling the complexities of the Atlassian stuff, but a dedicated person/team would have fixed the problem with the old tools, too.

As far as Confluence competitors go, in the vicinity of 2010 there was a lovely MediaWiki fork called DekiWiki (later MindTouch Core). It was easy to set up and use, fast, WYSIWYG editing, attachments. Unfortunately Mindtouch (the company) pivoted into- well, I never quite understood what, but it didn't involve developing deki and it became defunct. It would have been very interesting to see where it stacked up today if it was kept alive.

Because Atlassian pulled a Microsoft and made sure everyone had already irreplaceably adopted their products into their workflows before they made this move.

Confluence is unmatched in the niche it is in - if you compare feature for feature many wikis seem comparable; but the amount of addons for Confluence is stupid high, and many do weird little things that are really helpful for business.

Every place I've worked self hosts and my current company still does. While EOL is still aways away for server (2/2024), it's gonna be a dark day when it arrives.

In enterprise timescales, 2/2024 is not as “aways away” as you think.