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827 points surgomat | 8 comments | | HN request time: 2.497s | source | bottom

I was the main contributor to workout.lol, an open-source fitness app to easily build a workout routine. The project had traction (1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks, ~20K visits/month), but was eventually sold due to video licensing hurdles. The new owner stopped maintaining it, and the repo went abandoned.

Over the next 9 months, I sent 15 emails to try to save it : no replies. Feature requests & issues were ignored. The community was left with a "broken" tool let's say.

I couldn't just let it die So I built the new version from scratch with the same open-source spirit, but a better architecture long-term vision, more features and no license problems.

It's called : Workout.cool (https://workout.cool). What it offers: 100% open-source, MIT-licensed - 1200+ exercises (with videos, attributes, translations) - Progress tracking - Multilingual-ready - Self-hostable

I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing it because I believe in open fitness tools, and I’ve been passionate about strength training for 15+ years.

If this resonates with you, feel free to: - Star the repo - Share with fitness/tech friends - Suggest features - Contribute code/design/docs

Together, we can build the open-source fitness platform we all wanted to easily build a workout routine and get in shape

Website: https://workout.cool GitHub: https://github.com/Snouzy/workout-cool

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abtinf ◴[] No.44310264[source]
Just out of curiosity: if the original project was open source, why did you decide to restart from scratch?
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1. surgomat ◴[] No.44310406[source]
I actually tried really hard not to

sent 15 emails over 9 months to the new owner, offering to help or even take over the repo but i had no replies.

Issues and PRs were ignored(you juste have to see the issues section of the report). Rebuilding from scratch was the only way to fix the licensing & continue the project i guess

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2. Asraelite ◴[] No.44310517[source]
So why didn't you fork it?

And what specifically were the licensing issues? workout.lol is MIT from what I can see.

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3. cAtte_ ◴[] No.44310822[source]
just fork it?
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4. abtinf ◴[] No.44310842[source]
I think the missing context here is what is meant by “fix the licensing”. Both the original project and this new one are MIT, so naively there doesn’t seem to be an issue.
5. surgomat ◴[] No.44310860[source]
the code was indeed MIT.

The licensing issue I referred to was about the videos: many of them came from paid/licensed sources

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6. surgomat ◴[] No.44310869[source]
the original project was built in javascript with a NoSQL backend (mongo).

I wanted to move to a more "new", (robust?) and maintainable stack with TypeScript and a SQL-based backend (PostgreSQL)

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7. ◴[] No.44310873{3}[source]
8. abtinf ◴[] No.44310887{3}[source]
This makes a lot more sense and sounds like a good move for the overall health of the project.