Story of Mattermost: Open-Sourced Competitor to Slack • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 8:38 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #124

andybak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So - non-developers resisted Slack or Slack-like things? That's interesting. I'm a developer but I find it easy to empathize with non-developers because I hate any tech orthogonal to the actual task at hand that requires a learning curve. I usually find that other things have pushed that thing out of my brain by the time I have to use it again. Unlike most developers I'm no fan of Markdown (I can manage links and lis…

I share some of your resentment for having to learn new things to engage in what is arguably a trivial activity at this point in time - sharing (formatted) text or other media with your teammates. This is probably a factor in why many of our users prefer "simpler" approaches... At least from their perspective. One would argue markdown is simpler and faster than using any MS Word-style interface if you are experienced…

Slack doesn’t actually do Markdown; it’s just a little bit ahead of what Hacker News offers. And diffing PDFs and Word Documents is possible, but annoying: you need a custom diff tool for it that you integrate with Git.

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

#202

Post by it33 » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 8:44 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #200

it33 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks sjburt, Mattermost CEO here. We have 800+ upvotes that agree with you, here a link to the feature proposal forum post and open tickets on this: https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge... Anyone interested in contributing to the work, we’d welcome your help

The ticket you linked to said the feature is “planned”, so I’m not sure what you mean when you say you’d welcome help. Are you working on this internally (and as such this is essentially a “we’re looking for mobile engineers”) or are you soliciting contributions from the open source community to work on this?

Ticket is unscheduled, work is open source, if you're interested in contributing please comment on the ticket and the team can discuss: https://mattermost.atlassian.net/browse/MM-11067

On hiring, yes, we're hiring too, that's perhaps the most committed route to take: https://mattermost.com/careers/

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

#203

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 8:45 AM UTC

pyrosome wrote: post #187

Does anyone have legal experience and know what the restrictions are to forking of the Mattermost project? I'm a programmer with experience in backend development and security and would be willing to donate some time to work on developing a stronger community implementation of Mattermost - only I'm not sure what the legally correct way is to go about it. What I'm hoping to find is a FOSS sherpa to help me navigate se…

The Mattermost source code is AGPL. Fork away!

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

#204

Post by kqr » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 8:58 AM UTC

detaro wrote: post #171

shmerl wrote: post #168

It's not using Matrix? What's the point in making an open source however non federated IM service?

Many companies using such a system wouldn't even want federation, and it adds a bunch of complexity.

That might be true for many companies, but I think also that many companies could benefit from federation -- they just don't know it.

It has been standard practise everywhere I've worked that in business-to-business relations, people have to create accounts for each other's Slack networks.

That is ridiculous. Imagine having to sign up for separate email accounts on the email servers of all of your customers. It just wouldn't be acceptable other than in extreme circumstances; you already have an email account -- why shouldn't you be able to email with your customers/suppliers/vendors from that?

But we accept it with IM because we're so jaded by now. Though if federation was a more well understood concept, I'm sure multiple of the companies I've worked at would jump at the chance of not putting its business relations through the pain of registering dozens of accounts to IM with different people.

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

#205

Post by sneak » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:05 AM UTC

Operyl wrote: post #172

sneak wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe they store the enterprise specific code in another git repo that has to be checked out, for one (from reading their Makefile).

The binaries they release (including that code) are MIT licensed according to their readme, which means that modifying those should also be no problem.

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

#206

Post by dijit » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:29 AM UTC

indigochill wrote: post #185

maxpert wrote: post #162

Love the fact people are adopting Opensource solutions but corporates won’t budge. I think the hardest penetration for anyone right now is Microsoft Teams. Since they started bundling teams with Office they have been able to boast about numbers and actually hurt Slack. I wonder what is roadmap for Mattermost. Shameless plug I myself did an opensource version of a chat server called raspchat https://github.com/maxpert…

In my org we have Teams and Slack (and Skype for Business!). Corporate (and our one token diehard Microsoft fanboy) gave a weak effort at pushing Teams, but everyone was already on one of the other two so for us Teams is just sitting on our computers like an appendix that's useless but also just enough effort to cut out that it stays in.

I have the inverse. The only thing _everyone_ is on is teams. Slack is too expensive and introducing yet another chat program is not going to be met with anything other than resistance.

I really dislike teams.

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

#207

Post by alias_neo » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:34 AM UTC

it33 wrote: post #196

alias_neo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just didn't always behave and syntax highlighting didn't work at all sometimes; but it may have been that the system as a whole was misconfigured.

Mattermost CEO here, thanks for trying us out! Would love to squash the bug for you, open to filing an issue?> https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/new We used to send bug coins just for release candidates, but if you find a bug in production you get one too now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6FJsdE_aY

Thanks for the response, we'll be sure to post anything that looks like a bug! At this point it's likely our operations team simply hadn't configured it correctly (it is a trial and not a production deployment).

Best regards to the team.

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

#208

Post by piger » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 9:52 AM UTC

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…

The open-source version also lack any data retention option, meaning that your only option is to let the database grow indefinitely; you can manually delete stuff from the db, but last time I've checked that was not recommended.

Deploying Mattermost is not ideal, as the server requires write access to its JSON configuration file and will overwrite it from time to time, which makes using any configuration manager pointless: after upgrading mattermost you have to fetch the "updated" configuration file from your server and import it back into your configuration manager (and since it's JSON you might get different key sorting and indentation offset).

Despite the above I like Mattermost and I've been regularly using it for more than 1 year, basically for free.

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

#209

Post by tabbott » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 11:00 AM UTC

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…

This is, fundamentally, the Open Core business plan, which Mattermost is executing quite successfully. You get all the marketing benefits of being "open source", but few IT departments will use your software in production without buying the enterprise license, so you get most of the revenue you'd have had if you were closed source.

Folks have different perspectives on Open Core. It's definitely a lot better from a freedom perspective than proprietary software, so I don't want to be too down on it. But it isn't really FOSS, and I think the difference is important, which is why Zulip is following the commercially more difficult path of 100% FOSS. Even obviously enterprise features developed entirely by our paid team, like SAML authentication are FOSS, and our plan is for it to remain that way forever.

It's commercially more difficult because it means right now we have users at governments and Fortune 500 companies and whatnot who've reached out to tell us they how much they love Zulip, but nonetheless aren't paying us anything. On the flipside, Zulip has been very successful in building a large community of volunteer major contributors (some handy stats are in our release blog posts, e.g. last week's https://blog.zulip.org/2019/12/13/zulip-2-1-released/). I don't think that would have happened had we taken Mattermost's aggressively Open Core approach..

(I lead the Zulip project and company)

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

#210

Post by kmlx » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 11:09 AM UTC

_trampeltier wrote: post #90

bob1029 wrote: post #45

We went Skype => Slack => MS Teams => Mattermost for our developers. If Teams wasn't such garbage at basic things like markup and pasting screenshots, we might still be using it for everything. I had no real concerns with Slack from a development perspective. We simply wanted to try a unified messaging platform for the whole enterprise (our non-developers much prefer Teams/Skype for some reason). That experiment fail…

In our company we are the test team for MS TEAMS. Short but honest. MS TEAMS is a real mess. I have no idea why MS let this software going public like this. Does anybody think that's a good piece of software?

> Does anybody think that's a good piece of software?

only if you haven't tried slack.