51–60 of 222 posts
I don't really get why there is so many Slack alternatives coming up these days. On every post like this there is tons of comment linking to other Slack alternatives, it's not like this is gonna be _the_ Slack-alternative. Here is a non exhaustive list : RocketChat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624737 Let's Chat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040841 Friends : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94…
> We’re a YC-backed indie video game company releasing an open source alternative to Slack. Don't want to troll you guys here, but if you're a video game company why are you spending so much time building a Slack clone? I was expecting some short of explanation in your blog post like "we did this because this serves as a core piece of our company for X reason and Slack didn't fit our use case for Y reason".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_Technologies#Initial_fun...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell if you're aware of the coincidence, but did you know that Slack was a pivot from game development just like Stewart Butterfield's previous unicorn Flickr?
"Unicorn" is probably the silliest term of the year. But it degrades to meaninglessness if you include Flickr, which sold to Yahoo! in 2005, for $20MM.
Unlike Slack, Mattermost is open source...
Teams suffer when SaaS companies lose focus. Since it’s open source,
Mattermost can endure through its community. If quality declines,
anyone can fork the code and take stewardship.
(a) Mattermost is built by a video game company, so there is no focus to start with.
(b) Moving from a SaaS product to a self-hosted open source component runs against the process of commoditisation so is ultimately only ever going to be of niche value. After all, why spend scarce and expensive engineering time setting up, maintaining, and potentially having to fork a product, when you could just pay $however-much/month and not have to worry about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IRC protocol might not be pretty, but what protocol is? HTTP? AMQP? XMPP? Protocols are not meant to be pretty, just efficient and robust enough to support the desired feature set. It's a shame that none of Slack, Hipchat, now Mattermost support IRC. They're all just IRC clones, drawing on the same ideas, just giving you a crappy (but pretty!) web interface.
Slack "supports" IRC in that you can allow IRC connections, and then people can connect to your Slack instance via IRC. This might also be the case for some of the alternatives. And it's a pain in the neck! It means that some of the participants in the channel are not able to read what's happened while they were away. Some of them get encoding errors. The IRC people do not get the same graphical elements as everybody…
Everyone I've ever worked with who uses IRC has a client or bouncer running somewhere that never disconnects and assumes UTF-8, so neither of these are realistic problems.
can i run it on Linux?
Unlike Slack, Mattermost is open source... Teams suffer when SaaS companies lose focus. Since it’s open source, Mattermost can endure through its community. If quality declines, anyone can fork the code and take stewardship. Open source and focus are the wrong arguments here. (a) Mattermost is built by a video game company, so there is no focus to start with. (b) Moving from a SaaS product to a self-hosted open sourc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand you reasoning at all. What could be the problem with using a chat software that is released under AGPL?
Because almost certainly engineers will want to integrate an on-premises system into their existing system, and that will trigger the AGPL for all the systems that are network-connected to the AGPL system. Unless you are sure that your engineers will know to not try to integrate the AGPL software with any of your existing systems, I agree that people should just stay away.
The AGPL requires that you offer to distribute the source code to derivative works you make of AGPLed code; and it requires that you make that offer to a) people you have distributed binaries to and b) people you permit to access that derivative work over a network.
I guess I can imagine someone arguing that, by integrating Mattermost (for example) with another system, you are thereby giving users of that other system access to your installation of Mattermost, and so you would be required to offer them the source to that installation of Mattermost. Is that what you mean by "trigger the AGPL"?
I don't really get why there is so many Slack alternatives coming up these days. On every post like this there is tons of comment linking to other Slack alternatives, it's not like this is gonna be _the_ Slack-alternative. Here is a non exhaustive list : RocketChat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624737 Let's Chat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040841 Friends : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94…
Has anyone used a self-hosted one they were satisfied with? Which one?
Unlike Slack, Mattermost is open source... Teams suffer when SaaS companies lose focus. Since it’s open source, Mattermost can endure through its community. If quality declines, anyone can fork the code and take stewardship. Open source and focus are the wrong arguments here. (a) Mattermost is built by a video game company, so there is no focus to start with. (b) Moving from a SaaS product to a self-hosted open sourc…
The same way that having a closed client prevents you from customising it to fit your needs but can be helpful if you had no intention to do so in the first place.