The website says HopToDesk is Open Source but there is no link to any repos that I can find on the website. GitLab has a recently opened HopToDesk account with just 5 stars and no obvious traceability on first look from my phone to any real identifiable human contributors.
HopToDesk says it's an American company based in the US but LinkedIn is not showing me any evidence of the company existing and no employees associated with it. Neither does the preliminary googling I've done. My searches are far from exhaustive and certainly not authoritative but normally when someone builds a company that solves an important problem the people involved are proud of having done so and are easily findable. The first 5 other remote access software companies I looked up on LinkedIn all had obvious search results with easily discoverable employees, founders, and etc.
The License file in the GitLab repo is a generic AGPL file with no mention of any corporate entity or individual holding any copyrights. Again, this is a quick look from my phone so not authoritative, but again it's not at all confidence inspiring.
Commercial remote access products are quite expensive to subscribe to and typically have real costs to operate in the form of connectivity charges. If customers are not paying for the service, are the customers (and their machines) the real product being sold here?
I'm not finding anything in a quick search that gives me any confidence I should trust this app, and I'm seeing lots of things that are not confidence inspiring.
Going by the interactions listed in that issue, I'm not so sure how reliable this fork is, though.
It probably doesn't have to, but I'd expect a fork to mention its origin and explain at least the advantages it's supposed to have.
6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856620
16 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33730299
22 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33656637
> HopToDesk should simply work and be able to connect to any peer without needing to change any router or firewall settings. Other remote desktop tools such as Windows Remote Desktop and VNC do require setting up port forwarding or opening ports on the router or firewall to allow remote connections to be made, however this is not the case with HopToDesk
Does that means that all traffic is routed through some of their servers?
Edit: they say it's open source so I went to https://github.com/hoptodesk to look at the code and surprisingly there are only a couple of exe and an AGPL.
Edit2: the code is at https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk
Edit3 and Answer: they do have a server, search for rendezvous in the source code. Self hosting is in the roadmap, see https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk/-/issues/5
I found DWService as an alternative (https://www.dwservice.net/en/home.html) and have given it a brief try but was surprised not to find any mentions of it on HN. It seems to have an open source client, but the back end is not open source. Does anyone know this service and have any thoughts about it?
I'm giving RustDesk a try now instead of this based on people's comments here.
I am an ardent supporter of rustdesk because it allignes with my belief system and the development is rocket fast.
You submit a bug request and it will be fixed very quickly.
They have a self hosting server so its not like there are problems with "trusting" the server. You can roll your own. Compared to anydesk/team viewer/no machine/zoho assist whatever, this is the only open source software that actually competes with proprietary software and is feature complete to a good bit.
Again, as a fork of rustdesk, what exactly are they bringing on the table?
The logos look really similar....
