Is open source still alive, or can iForels stay free forever?

Anyone who has tried to run a team on someone else's software knows the bargain. You don't own the tool; you rent a seat in it. You can't see how it works and trust a black box with your data, hoping the roadmap eventually reaches you. And the day you outgrow it, the price climbs and the exit gets expensive. This is the new norm for useful software, and most people have stopped noticing it.

Our attention, though, was captured by one European project that offers a glimpse of how it could change at scale. The following is material about IFORELS - an open-source productivity tool like mega startups alike Airtable, Notion, etc., created by Vlad Panin, who open-sourced his project for anyone to deploy and change freely.  He’s built a self-hosted alternative to Airtable — relational data with the ease of a spreadsheet — and puts it on GitHub, source open, free to download and run.

Developing software in Europe is quite different from building a fake-it-till-you-make-it startup in Silicon Valley. Those who have ever tried know that it requires near-perfect products first, and then maybe, you have a chance to raise capital for revenue scale. Based on public data, it was never an option for the founder, so he deployed the SDK to the npm registry , uploaded the entire codebase to GitHub, and registered the iforels.com domain first - without even having a company.

It’s hard to believe, yet there is no company behind it to this day, and no plan for one. That openness is also how IFORELS improves. People run it for real work, hit real limits, and say so—and the tool evolves toward what they actually need. Gantt-chart automation arrives that way. So does the first "AI employee," built to take repetitive knowledge work off people's hands. Vlad believes that a 2017 research paper by Google called "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced a new AI architecture, has a good chance to change our perception of how productivity tools look in the future, and he is convinced that open source is the only way to make it right.  

What makes the choice unusual is who is making it. Panin spent his career on the side of software, where nothing is given away. He founded Orkin, a systems-integration firm in Eastern Europe; he delivered United Nations Smart City programs across Europe; he built an enterprise IT-stack for the largest industrial Water Treatment companies in the world, which is quite commercial from any given angle.  Those are worlds of auditors, procurement officers, and lock-in rooms where software is sold to you aggressively and on someone else's terms.

Nonetheless, IFORELS remains open-sourced, yet more skeptical experts claim that the founder will not be able to keep this project free for a long time and has to raise venture capital or make a premium version in the future. Our job is simply to inform our readers about the risks of using it as an alternative productivity tool.

On a positive note, iForels (or iFrame, as the founder calls the open-sourced version) operates as a highly flexible, block-based workspace that unifies note-taking, document collaboration, and knowledge management into a single centralized wiki. It focuses on task-heavy design, allowing you to build custom pages using movable blocks of text, images, and embedded files, along with lightweight relational databases. It excels at centralizing company wikis, documentation, and personal knowledge bases, though it can require more manual setup to match the specialized project management or deep data processing capabilities of its paid competitors from Silicon Valley.

It is worth noting that Vlad Panin allegedly bought the domain iforels.com, and although it’s not advertised as a separate project, it currently hosts the latest version of the product for free use. It might be a step towards future commercialization, and you should think twice about whether you can support the current open-source code yourself.

If you still feel confident in your skills, it might be a great option indeed. Because the software is self-hosted, your data lives on your own infrastructure, and since you have access to the entire code, you can read exactly what the tool does before you trust it with anything, and change what you don't like instead of filing a request and waiting. If something is missing, the fix is a fork, not a support ticket. Nothing is hidden behind a login, and nothing is rented back to you a seat at a time.

We’ll see how the project evolves. Meanwhile, founders like Vlad Panin deserve credit for building products that prove that capable software does not have to arrive locked, metered, and opaque. It can simply be put in the open, paid for, and handed to the people who will make it better.