Gitter is open source • Hacker News Board

siliconc0w wrote: post #8

Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order. Mattermost just needs (AFAIK) a relational database. Also, less relevant but the Gitlab UI has far too much wasted whitespace. Like 85% of the page is navigation. I like open source competitors to incumbents but maybe just copy Github here - no one is gonna say anything.

Hi, co-founder of Gitter here.

Gitter is not intended to be a replacement for Mattermost, Slack or other team collaboration tools. We see Gitter as a community instead.

As such, we're not expecting to see a huge uptake of on-site installations, so the list of required services (es, neo etc) is big compared to other products focused on on-prem.

We're hoping that our users will contribute to the main site, Gitter.im.

Obviously, we're also totally happy with users running their own Gitter installations but, while we would like it to be easy, ease-of-installation of a production instance is not a goal currently.

Re: Gitter is open source

#16

Post by mydigitalself » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 8:41 AM UTC

volent wrote: post #7

If you go through the commit history you can see that they removed a lot of secret keys from the repo. What if the main reason why people don't want to opensource their project is because they don't know how to use their secret keys without including them in the repo ?

Not having started out as an open source project, this was always a major consideration.

Once we've finished fully open sourcing everything, we should look to write up our experience around the conversation, in particular, the tools we used.

Re: Gitter is open source

#17

Post by jsiepkes » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 8:43 AM UTC

While I applaud the initiative of Gitlab to opensource Gitter I think the target audience for self hosting is rather small. I think alternatives like Zulip or Mattermost are probably better suited for most organizations.

I am however interested to see if the community starts making the "main instance" (gitter.im) better.

Interested to know what the Gitlab / Gitter guys and gals think what the target audience is.

Re: Gitter is open source

#18

Post by mydigitalself » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 8:44 AM UTC

kennydude wrote: post #13

Huh, they seem to be using Marionette for most of the UI apart from using React for "topics UI"

We started Gitter before React was A Thing and Marionette had a lot of the functionality we needed. We even hacked it to do server-side pre-rending and live collection binding. Topics was an experiment in how we could look to move towards react and evaluate blending technologies.

Re: Gitter is open source

#19

Post by suprememoocow » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 8:45 AM UTC

volent wrote: post #7

If you go through the commit history you can see that they removed a lot of secret keys from the repo. What if the main reason why people don't want to opensource their project is because they don't know how to use their secret keys without including them in the repo ?

Andrew, co-founder of Gitter here.

Removing secrets was a lot of work - more than I expected - while we open-sourced the product.

I agree with your sentiment though. Handling secrets in a codebase is not something that it currently easy or standardised.

As an aside, BFG Repo Cleaner really helped a lot with cleaning things up: https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/

Re: Gitter is open source

#20

Post by mydigitalself » Tue, Jul 04, 2017, 8:49 AM UTC

jsiepkes wrote: post #17

While I applaud the initiative of Gitlab to opensource Gitter I think the target audience for self hosting is rather small. I think alternatives like Zulip or Mattermost are probably better suited for most organizations. I am however interested to see if the community starts making the "main instance" (gitter.im) better. Interested to know what the Gitlab / Gitter guys and gals think what the target audience is.

Great question.

We're trying to achieve two things with open sourcing Gitter.

Firstly, we see Gitter as more of a community than a product. That we have nearly 1,000,000 developers coming together on the platform to talk about code and open source software where public rooms far, far outweigh private rooms, is testament to that. So we're not trying to compete with MatterMost.

What we're trying to facilitate is to allow the community and users of GitLab to contribute to the experience of the community. We've always had a very small team at Gitter and the surface area of the product is massive. This way the community can help us make it a better place by improving the product.

We also have some communities who are interested in running their own public instance entirely. Sure they could use other products, but Gitter is built community and public first and suits a lot of different needs that other products don't necessarily facilitate out of the box.