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Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack

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

#151

Post by theamk »

aidenn0 wrote: post #59

Last I checked, Jabber could completely replace all of these things except there were no good iPhone clients. Anyone know of an even remotely usable iPhone Jabber client?

Last time I checked, you had to have a very specific server/client combo for very basic features like mobile app, offline messages, and multi-device message history. Grabbing a random server or client may result in some (or all) features missing.

That’s why we recommended Slack for the next workplace. No chance to get anything wrong, and no need for backups either.

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

#152

Post by sneak »

antioedipus wrote: post #137

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters. Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positivel…

As I’m reading it, Mattermost (as source) is released under the AGPL, which makes it both legal and ethical (indeed, they have explicitly consented to allow you to distribute modifications) to stub out all the license checking and enable all of the enterprise functionality without any payments, tracking, or phone-home.

It seems to me this is the point of free/open source software: anyone can improve it and make it more functional and distribute those improvements. The first logical improvement, to me, is removing the unnecessary license checks that disable useful features of the software.

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...

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

#153

Post by sneak »

teddyh wrote: post #105
duskwuff wrote: post #36

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…

> 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

AFAIK, even the enterprise features of Mattermost are f/oss (agpl) and the license checks can simply be stubbed out if you don’t like them.

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

#154

Post by RockIslandLine »

sombremesa wrote: post #133
e12e wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting points. I suspect this is why chat is such a crap, low-throughput form communication; it's trivial for the sender to ship of a half-assed message - and very hard for the receiver to handle low-hundred conversations in a work-day - precisely because few(er) senders take the time to write a short, but dense message - and expect a reply-response dialogue "to quickly sort things out". Which is much harder to…

I'd be interested to see the effects of using a retention policy[0] to discourage the use of chat as a be-all and end-all. IIRC some companies actually do this. [0] https://slack.com/help/articles/203457187-Customize-message-...

When I worked as a stock trader, all of our chats were logged as a matter of legality.

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

#155

Post by mgbmtl »

antioedipus wrote: post #137

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters. Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positivel…

Regular users cannot delete other people's posts and channels, but they can indeed archive any public channel.

I run a mattermost server for a Free Software project. We have over 2000 users, but around 300 monthly active users, 100 daily. I worry about it sometimes, but trolling in our community is pretty rare.

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

#156

Post by henryfjordan »

sneak wrote: post #152
antioedipus wrote: post #137

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters. Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positivel…

As I’m reading it, Mattermost (as source) is released under the AGPL, which makes it both legal and ethical (indeed, they have explicitly consented to allow you to distribute modifications) to stub out all the license checking and enable all of the enterprise functionality without any payments, tracking, or phone-home. It seems to me this is the point of free/open source software: anyone can improve it and make it mo…

Yep, and this is why the AGPL is not for protecting your IP, only for ensuring that the code remains open forever.

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

#157

Post by mgbmtl »

shric wrote: post #144
lillesvin wrote: post #141

I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff. While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could…

The only reason I haven't advocated replacing Slack with IRC is it lacks a sensible way of keeping history. Everyone either has to keep their client running and connected all the time (usually this is only feasible with tmux/screen on a server), rely on bouncer hacks, or something like IRCCloud which maintains the connection for you but is proprietary and not self-hostable.

I use https://riot.im for IRC for some channels. It stays connected, keeps archives, etc.

For small communities, I recommend Mattermost or Rocket Chat. I used to be a die-hard fan of irssi inside tmux, but seeing how tiny usability issues can really cause adoption issues, I wouldn't even recommend riot.im to less technical people.

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

#158

Post by it33 »

tcbasche wrote: post #87
mikece wrote: post #4

I like that Mattermost is written in Go and can deploy on-prem with Docker. Those are two huge points for MM over Slack IMO.

Why does what language it's written in matter? I like Go too but I'm genuinely curious

Mattermost CEO here for a biased opinion. In my mind, the properties of a language can shape the outcome of an open source project.

As an example, when we were starting the Mattermost open source project we were considering a few options for different reasons:

1) Erlang - Real time properties made it nice for a high scale collaboration platform. The trade-off was that it's a really specialized language and there aren't that many people excited to learn Erlang.

2) C/C++ - Really powerful language and can compile to binary format, making install and upgrade easier for admins who don't want to be managing interpreted languages. Trade-off was it was an older language and there's fewer people excited about writing for it, and there can be a fair bit of nuance.

3) Python - Really popular, easy-to-read. Trade-off is things could get tricky as performance and scale needs increase. Also, doesn't support binary format, so more complex install and maintenance options would need to be used.

In the end we used Golang because it had many of the positive properties of Erlang, Python and C/C++ (compiles to binary, easy-to-read with gofmt, real-time support, etc.) and the trade-offs were fewer.

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

#160

Post by gyrgtyn »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #138
duskwuff wrote: post #36

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…

What you're describing sounds similar to crippleware. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware

not sure that's pc buddy
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