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Bye bye BetterSlack

g3rv4.com

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Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#201

Post by lx3459683 »

gknoy wrote: post #104
scoom wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A binding agreement? Why would he sign one of those?

I think what tptacek means is that when we sign up for a service, we agree to terms of use. Even if we don't sign it, it might be legally undecided as to whether that counts as a binding contract, nor whether "terminate the user's service" is the only recourse the service provider has.

In most of the world it is decided. The decision is click-wrap 'contracts' are unenforceable. Starting with the fact that they don't meet the definition of a contract.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#202

Post by g3rv4 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #169
g3rv4 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because... I have lots of things to work on, lots of things I want to build, lots of people I want to talk with. None of them involve talking with a lawyer in a different country over something that's really not that important in my life.

Maybe let other people continue it? Shame to throw stuff away. Plenty of countries where that cease and desist would go straight to thrash.

Nothing is stopping other people from doing that now.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#203

Post by 0x0 »

TheDong wrote: post #185
mattigames wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

He he, too funny you mention zooming. I've had a bug report going for a while where their emoji sprite sheet gets all messed up if you run at smaller zoom levels. I think they still haven't fixed it properly. :)

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#204

Post by megous »

yonran wrote: post #168
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.

One of Chrome Web Store’s terms is that a developer is not allowed to publish an extension that “knowingly violates a third party’s terms of service.”[1] So even if the author has the 1st Amendment right to publish the extension on his own website, Google will likely take it down from the Chrome Web Store. [1]: https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/terms

What if it's a greasemonkey script?

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#205

Post by segmondy »

detaro wrote: post #165
noxToken wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see all of these comments in here telling you that Slack doesn't have a leg to stand on, that you should do your best to stick it to them, that you're in the right, that you should ignore them, etc. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "If I were in this person's shoes, I'd probably distribute it privately to a few people who might want it, and in spite of all the hard work, let the project die in official capacity." On princi…

Especially since anyone thinking it should continue can just fork and do so.

Once he delete it, everyone will lose their fork if they don't have a local actual independent copy from Github

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#206

Post by g3rv4 »

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?

it’s this: https://chat.stackoverflow.com but unfortunately, it’s not open source or available for other teams to use in private.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#207

Post by g3rv4 »

thsowers wrote: post #181
g3rv4 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

that’s def something I’d like to try if they are ok with it

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#208

Post by aiiane »

Ekuju wrote: post #183
gandreani wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Discord doesn't really solve any problems in the text chat space any better than Slack, and introduces additional problems like its lack of ability to leave/join channels.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#209

Post by kbenson »

jklinger410 wrote: post #161
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…

>Blocking ads is not quite the same thing as modifying a product Explain.

> Blocking ads is not quite the same thing as modifying a product

I was going to comment something similar, but in trying to come up with details and examples to explain my point, I realized I couldn't, I so I decided they aren't really different with respect to modifying a product. What makes them different is how the product was modified, but that presupposes modifying the product and that's not really the way the question has been posed.

Blocking ads is removing the revenue mechanism, and is akin to patching out account verification for a desktop product (assuming the webapp/webpage has some AUP stating that the ads are required to be viewed as part of the service).

Modifying a program takes many forms, from removing authentication mechanisms to fixing bugs or adding enhancements, so while the legal system may or may not acknowledge those differences, it's at best an overly broad description of the case in question.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#210

Post by rickycook »

throwawaymath wrote: post #193
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'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're in the extreme minority if you honestly confused Slack the chat client for Slackware the Linux distribution. That's...a leap. Frankly the origin of Slack's name has nothing to do with Slackware Linux (or Linux in general) so I'm having difficulty following your grievance here.

well, his is the second comment in a week that i’ve seen (unrelated to betterslack) that mentioned this point. he’s certainly not the only one!
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