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Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

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Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#61

Post by mrmondo »

StavrosK wrote: post #51
volent wrote: post #5

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?

Let's chat looked great but we were a little put off by mongodb and something else that escapes my mind right now so we ended up sticking with OpenFire for our XMPP server / chat rooms for the time being although it certainly has it's share of bugs.

Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#62

Post by richmarr »

ville wrote: post #57
richmarr wrote: post #54

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…

Funny you say that, given that the company that built Slack (originally named Tiny Speck) was also a video game company initially. :)

Funny in what way? Not sure I see the point you're alluding to.

Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#64

Post by StavrosK »

mrmondo wrote: post #61
StavrosK wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone used a self-hosted one they were satisfied with? Which one?

Let's chat looked great but we were a little put off by mongodb and something else that escapes my mind right now so we ended up sticking with OpenFire for our XMPP server / chat rooms for the time being although it certainly has it's share of bugs.

Ah, an XMPP server is a good choice for IM for us, although I can't get the team to stick around in the channels for very long. Maybe that's a culture problem, though.

Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#65

Post by richmarr »

amandine wrote: post #60
richmarr wrote: post #54

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 problem of SaaS is having your company data stored by someone you have to trust... So I reckon it depends on your use case: if I'm a small company who doesn't want to bother running/maintaining the service then I'm more than happy to hand it over to someone else and trust them. If I don't want to trust anyone with my data I'd rather have something simple to deploy and run myself. The same way that having a closed…

Yeah, there'll always be companies like that but as more and more large orgs, government departments, etc. migrate all their email over to Gmail, I'm starting to consider that as a niche. Those orgs are also disproportionately likely to want to build their own thing because they have a hope of making the economics of scale add up.

Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#66

Post by zephod »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #45
1stop wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it won't... It will at most trigger the AGPL for the integration off that system... which is it's proprietary no one will ever want... hence no one will ever sue you to release it. Are Tinfoil hats on sale or something?

No, just folks with a little more legal experience than "potentially and willfully violate the terms and spirit of a license because we assume nobody will ever sue us," which also doesn't scale beyond a team of two. Not enough people take license compliance seriously. (Your comment an example.) Just to communicate the impact here, getting compliance wrong can result in significant legal liability. You and I are both…

I find it interesting that you're getting consistent downvotes for saying the same thing my startup's legal counsel has repeatedly said about the AGPL: Be extremely careful. Assume nothing and write defensively, because the nature of an "integration" is too vague to risk a company's infrastructure.

I get the impression others here are happily screwing around with AGPL integrations with nothing to lose.

Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#67

Post by amandine »

richmarr wrote: post #65
amandine wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of SaaS is having your company data stored by someone you have to trust... So I reckon it depends on your use case: if I'm a small company who doesn't want to bother running/maintaining the service then I'm more than happy to hand it over to someone else and trust them. If I don't want to trust anyone with my data I'd rather have something simple to deploy and run myself. The same way that having a closed…

Yeah, there'll always be companies like that but as more and more large orgs, government departments, etc. migrate all their email over to Gmail, I'm starting to consider that as a niche. Those orgs are also disproportionately likely to want to build their own thing because they have a hope of making the economics of scale add up.

True for big corps, although it's quite strange given they're usually the most paranoid ones on security.

But I was more thinking about techie SMBs to whom running a chat/collaboration server is not scary, better in terms of flexibility and cheaper than paying someone to handle it.

Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#68

Post by amandine »

StavrosK wrote: post #64
mrmondo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's chat looked great but we were a little put off by mongodb and something else that escapes my mind right now so we ended up sticking with OpenFire for our XMPP server / chat rooms for the time being although it certainly has it's share of bugs.

Ah, an XMPP server is a good choice for IM for us, although I can't get the team to stick around in the channels for very long. Maybe that's a culture problem, though.

I would blame UX there :) In my mind a collaboration tool should not be a burden, if people let it down, it means it's not appropriate. Hence the success of Slack: people realised collaboration can be made easy and real-time without being a pain.

And wrt self-hosted chat servers, you can have a look at some implementations of Matrix (http://matrix.org): there is an opensource a ref implementation of a server (https://github.com/matrix-org) and then a bunch of clients at different level of glossiness, for web, iOS and Android (http://matrix.org/blog/try-matrix-now/) available. Or you can build your own if you feel like it :) Fully decentralised and persistent communication.

No full blown collaboration tool but public & private chat rooms with the ability to exchange files and do 1:1 voice & video calls (group call is in the pipe).

Re: Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative

#69

Post by it33 »

tacone wrote: post #46
javiercr wrote: post #39

> 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".

They probably had to build similar stuff for some of their games perhaps.

Mattermost team here,

You guessed it, Mattermost is the 3rd version of what started as a portal/community site for our players (first version was forum-like, the second was Facebook-like, Mattermost is now HipChat/Slack-like).

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