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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

DocuSign itself just refers you to your own counsel for legal advice, but does publish and update a handy multi-country legal reference.

For the US one, at least, they give examples of where electronic signatures are pretty common and straightforward, and where you need to be careful.

Software-wise, they have features to help you show evidence of who signed, where, and when in multiple ways. Nothing magical, though.

If there were secret sauce, you would think they’d mention it prominently, but they don’t.

https://www.docusign.com/products/electronic-signature/legal...

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We also generate a completion certificate that has the time & ip addresses of everyone who accessed and modified a doc during the entire signing process, plus we are open source which means more transparent. We plan to publish a lot of content in that space but with limited resources currently we plan to build the product features first. Also, we are soon going to start our fund raise efforts which will ultimately speed up things.

And soon after suddenly the Pricing page appears, after 3 months of disappointment convenient features turn paying ones. In some more years it is just as expensive as Docusign.

Eh sorry, I’m just sad about Rocket Chat.

The self hosted version will always be free :)

Your CONTRIBUTING.md file says "By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under its MIT License." Since OpenSign is AGPLv3, why don't you allow contributions under the same license, if the self hosted version will always be free? I'm worried that the purpose of that might be to let you make it proprietary later.

AGPL for thee but not for me, for I require MIT.

To be fair, this is an entirely reasonable way to do business, but it's also a bit funny.

I guess this allows them integrate with proprietary code on their back end if necessary, whilst making it hard for a competitor to take their code and undercut them, since most corps with proprietary software to protect won't touch AGPLv3 with a barge pole.

Nothing prevents an AGPLv3 fork if OpenSign goes proprietary in future.

I'd rather this approach than yet another non-standard Amazon-proof licence.

> I guess this allows them integrate with proprietary code on their back end if necessary

Couldn't they have accomplished that just by asking for GPLv3 instead of AGPLv3? That would let them do so without letting them make the self-hosted version non-free, unlike asking for MIT.

> Nothing prevents an AGPLv3 fork if OpenSign goes proprietary in future.

Yes, but this would be true for almost any FOSS license offered and regardless of what they ask of contributors.

> I'd rather this approach than yet another non-standard Amazon-proof licence.

I very much agree with this.

Ive been using rabbitsign since 2021 to get signatures on legal docs for work.

Covid made this acceptable.

https://www.rabbitsign.com/

Those certs integrated with with any Timestamp Authority?

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