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Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

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101–110 of 248 posts

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "all team members are admins" is more usable than you think it is; I generally do this for many cloud services on most of my teams even at my day job; it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control, setting it up, and then someone who can't do what they need to do for their job cause you didn't give them enough access, or the only person who can do what needs done is on vacation, etc. I often s…

"Everyone is an admin" might be usable for some small teams, but it makes the software absolutely unusable for any sort of public project -- like open-source developers, or public communities. It really makes it clear that the primary purpose of the "team edition" is to drive sales of the commercial product, not to be usable in its own right.

Yeah, that seems right.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#102

Not a single comment here mention Google's Hangouts Chat I'm not surprised, it's a garbage product. We use it at work since it's bundled for free with GSuite But - The name is just awful, you can't even find it in Google's search since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results - Integrations and ecosystem around it is non existent - App doesn't see any meaningful updates - The Android…

> since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results

Not for long, as it's been killed and is now moribund.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#103
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more disturbing than the bug itself is the Mattermost team's response that this behavior is intentional for the free "team edition" of their software, and that "actually, I think the bug is that we should not be showing Channel Admin as a role in Team Edition" (i.e, users of the free edition don't get any kind of access controls, making it impractical to use outside a small group of trusted users). Potentially…

> Potentially controversial opinion: This isn't really open source. I know you were looking for this but I don't agree. Let's remind that Open Source fundamentally means _no expectations_. No expectations of support, no expectations of features, not even expectations of goodwill. Whenever a company complains that this or that open-source software doesn't work as expected and should do this, we all shout in chorus "th…

> Let's remind that Open Source fundamentally means _no expectations_.

No. Open Source, as defined, is about what the end user is allowed to do with the code they have. That’s it. What you describe is common, but not inherent. There are plenty of exceptions, like if you get Red Hat, you’ll get to have plenty of expectations, and Red Hat is still Open Source.

Please stop the ancient FUD about Open Source means having no support.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#104
post #14

I have a small team, but about a year ago, we deployed Mattermost on our K8s cluster using their Helm chart and I have been very pleased with the performance and stability. We never looked back at slack. I have not had to fiddle with the configuration at all since deploying it. It just works. And that is also considering that to save costs, I launched it on preemptible instances which go down usually once every 24 ho…

Did you do any integrations for voice chat?

Mattermost CEO here, Zoom plug-in is built in so one click for starting a Zoom meeting. There is also some voice features in our latest hackathon: https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-hackathon-2019-highli... (see mobile apps section).

Where either of these what you were interested in?

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#105

Yeah. But. https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320 Non-admins can delete/archive any channel #6320

What's more disturbing than the bug itself is the Mattermost team's response that this behavior is intentional for the free "team edition" of their software, and that "actually, I think the bug is that we should not be showing Channel Admin as a role in Team Edition" (i.e, users of the free edition don't get any kind of access controls, making it impractical to use outside a small group of trusted users). Potentially…

> This isn't really open source.

The usual term for it is “Open Core”, and is a legitimate, if frowned upon by many, practice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to push the agenda to switch our comms between developers fully to Keybase, but it will be probably rejected.

Keybase is.. not ready for prime time. It's pretty janky, channel discovery is a pain as is spam, and it's still got that weird crypto half-baked nonsense.

Team discovery could be a pain, but channel discovery within a team is pretty much everything I would expect it to be.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#107

Not a single comment here mention Google's Hangouts Chat I'm not surprised, it's a garbage product. We use it at work since it's bundled for free with GSuite But - The name is just awful, you can't even find it in Google's search since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results - Integrations and ecosystem around it is non existent - App doesn't see any meaningful updates - The Android…

I stopped using it about a year ago and was quite dissatisfied as well. Kinda thought they’d put a bit more effort to create a good product afterwards but somehow it looks like a low priority thing for Google. I don’t know why, they could be a very solid competitor and maybe even have an excuse to raise GSuite prices.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control Until one day, when you have some sort of incident, and it will have become very worth your while to "deal with" access control.

So, at your workplace, do you put unpickable locks on everyone's individual office door and enforce a policy that all doors are locked when not occupied (or heck even when occupied), so you won't have to "deal with" some insane coworker trashing someone elses office? How about tracking of who is in the bathroom when, with camera monitoring, so you can deal with it in case someone smears their poop on the walls?

Way more likely that someone presses that delete button in a temporary tantrum or by mistake than a coworker randomly trashing someone else's office (there are telling signs after all).

It's also way easier, cheaper and practical to prevent the first example than the second one.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just not worth spending time dealing with access control Until one day, when you have some sort of incident, and it will have become very worth your while to "deal with" access control.

So, at your workplace, do you put unpickable locks on everyone's individual office door and enforce a policy that all doors are locked when not occupied (or heck even when occupied), so you won't have to "deal with" some insane coworker trashing someone elses office? How about tracking of who is in the bathroom when, with camera monitoring, so you can deal with it in case someone smears their poop on the walls?

You are joking, right?

Laptops and physical property are one thing. But your digital empire of customer data is another. Encryption, MFA, inactivity based locking, access controls, and the principle of least privilege helps ensure that when something inevitably does happen, the blast radius is contained.

I don't really care if someone were to smash the hell out of the office. Laptops are locked. Data is encrypted. That's why in fact we have insurance.

But a disgruntled or even careless employee could irreversibly damage an enterprise by letting happen (or deliberately causing) a data breach. All because the org didn't want to bother "dealing with" access controls.

Re: Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

#110

Uber currently uses Mattermost but will most likely move to Slack. During my 2 years at Amazon, the SFO based Prime Now team used Mattermost but we were eventually forced to move to Chime a pitiful example of a chat client.

Mattermost CEO here, if Amazon is open to it, I’d love to see if there is a “Better together” story across AWS, Chime (meetings, voice, video, screen sharing) and Mattermost (developer, Ops and SRE workflows and integrations). We’ve heard the same from different Amazon teams looking to accelerate developer productivity
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