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Bye bye BetterSlack

g3rv4.com

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Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#181

Post by thsowers »

g3rv4 wrote: post #18
comesee wrote: post #7

I dont see any legal reason why you can't publish the extension under a different name. Your extension is under no legal obligation to follow their acceptable use policy, only the users that use your extension.

There are two problems with this approach: 1. I don't want to get involved in that, even if I'm based in Uruguay and they'd have a hard time suing me. 2. What they could do is put resources to detect the extension and block it. We could start a mouse and cat game that they'd win... I don't have their resources to invest in it. After all, all I wanted was to solve Slack for me, and that would make it harder.

You could still continue development on Github, and allow users to install the extension themselves. I believe this is the approach that some paywall bypass extensions take[0]

[0]: https://github.com/arthurpham/wsjUnblock

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#182

Post by 013a »

How is an acceptable use policy even relevant to the developer of this application? Its the users of the app who would be breaking the policy. At worst they can argue that he broke it while developing it... so they can go ahead and shut down his Slack account. Totally fair.

Change the name, obviously. But fuck these companies like Slack who think they run the world and that gives them the power to control what code you run on your computer.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#183

Post by Ekuju »

gandreani wrote: post #6
danmg wrote: post #2

Slack has really jumped the shark. Between this and their cutting off their IRC gateway, I don't really see the point of using it. You can't be openly hostile to people who create "hacks" like this if you're claiming to be a communication medium for "hackers."

Slack is no longer for "hackers". It's mainstream now. My company of 500 with only 30 devs uses it. These are power moves by Slack. They want to have greater control over the communication medium and presentation If you thought they were ever going to support extensions of their IRC gateway for long, then you misunderstood their product and who their market was or rather who their market became

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about discord?

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#184

Post by bluehatbrit »

miles_matthias wrote: post #145
g3rv4 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use bonfire, which is the same tool the community at Stack Overflow uses to interact.

Is there a link to bonfire somewhere? You're not talking about Facebook's video call app are you?

This is as far as I've gotten with Google on a mobile phone. http://dev.bonfire.stackoverflow.com/beta-access

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#185

Post by TheDong »

mattigames wrote: post #148
jahewson wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the case at all. Your “ownership” of the device isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. If you’ve signed an agreement with Slack not to modify their product, then you don’t get to modify their product. Blocking ads is not quite the same thing as modifying a product - but I don’t see any obvious reason why an EULA which forbids ad-blocking wouldn’t be enforceable. Though it would be deeply unpop…

You are not modifying slack (their product), when you request a website all they are sending you its a bunch of characters, including characters inside CSS or JS files, rendering those its up to your machine, you are not legally binded to render those in a specific way, otherwise screen readers would all be completely illegal, all threads of not modifying your local render of a website always end poorly by the people…

> You are not modifying slack (their product)

Their product are the bits they ship to you and the code they run on their servers.

You're modifying a part of their product.

Since you can't modify their product, you also obviously shouldn't be able to use any web browser to view slack because those browsers take those bytes they ship you and interpret them in the context of the browser windowing system (its userChrome.css for example)... that's also clearly modifying the experience they delivered to you.

You also shouldn't be able to use a computer monitor that has color settings different from the web designers working at slack. If you accidentally have a monitor with slightly less blue than theirs, well, you just modified the slack UI to be a little less blue. Obviously a ToS violation and you shouldn't use them at all.

God forbid if you zoom in on the page to modify their product's resolution/size.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#186

Post by erik_seaberg »

013a wrote: post #182

How is an acceptable use policy even relevant to the developer of this application? Its the users of the app who would be breaking the policy. At worst they can argue that he broke it while developing it... so they can go ahead and shut down his Slack account. Totally fair. Change the name, obviously. But fuck these companies like Slack who think they run the world and that gives them the power to control what code y…

IANAL but there's case law around maliciously causing a breach of contract.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#187

Post by toyg »

craigsmansion wrote: post #59

"we prefer that you do not include the word “Slack” in your product’s name." From the people who had no problems naming their product identical to the colloquial name of the oldest maintained GNU/Linux distribution, thereby confusing the hell out of actual technical people for the longest time with press releases. Also, Bob Dobbs called... (Edit: you can take away my upticks, but you will never take away my slack. "H…

I suspect the real beef is with the name. In one swoop, it dilutes their trademark and makes the case that Slack is inferior to something else. Big no-no.

I bet the Slack top brass just told legal to throw the book at the guy because of the name, and so they padded the letter with everything they could find, including weak technical arguments that they don't even enforce on others.

(I agree on the confusion with Slackware btw, it took me a while to realize they had no connection whatsover with Volkerding or the distro.)

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#188

Post by edhelas »

…or maybe just stop trying to play with the cat tail if you don't want to get scratched.

There is plenty of solutions out there to do chat messaging "kinda like" or maybe better than Slack. I'm using Slack daily and I can't find what this platform has something so magical about it.

I am personally building a communication client that can do IM, video-conferencing, file sharing, posting articles… all based on XMPP. It works in the browsers and we are proposing now apps for Android and macOS/Windows/Linux. It's way lighter than Slack, can be deployed easily on a VPS or in your company and is fully compatible with many other XMPP clients/bots (Github is proposing a XMPP bot for MUCs for example :)). If you want to try it out or know more: https://movim.eu.

If you don't like Movim, I still invite you to find open platforms that can be tuned/hacked/adapted to your needs, there's plenty of them in the wild ;)

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#189

Post by g3rv4 »

joewadcan wrote: post #175

At GitHub, we faced the same issue when ZenHub [1] came out with their chrome extension. While, Slack is well within their rights to _ask_ you not to modify their user experience, it's short sighted of them to do so. With ZenHub, we worked with them even closer because we saw that our users were happier using GitHub + ZenHub. We made it super clear that UI changes would likely break their app but that would be a risk…

I’m not being a good platform partner basically because they make it impossible for me to be one.

I’d love to avoid reverse engineering their minified code and use well documented APIs. Unfortunately, that’s not possible nor planned (as they told me on a tweet I linked on the post).

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#190

Post by g3rv4 »

edhelas wrote: post #188

…or maybe just stop trying to play with the cat tail if you don't want to get scratched. There is plenty of solutions out there to do chat messaging "kinda like" or maybe better than Slack. I'm using Slack daily and I can't find what this platform has something so magical about it. I am personally building a communication client that can do IM, video-conferencing, file sharing, posting articles… all based on XMPP. It…

I’d really like to give zulip a try... unfortunately, I don’t have voice or vote over that decision on my company.

Also, I love the company too much to resign over a such a small thing that can be fixed with a 20kb extension.

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